Ladies' Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy 9780691141886, 9780691141893, 0691141886, 9781400885749, 1400885744

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Ladies’ Greek

LADIES’ GREEK Victorian Translations of Tragedy Yopie Prins

Pr i nceton U n i v er sit y Pr e s s Pr i nceton a n d Ox for d

Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Top: Andrea Eis, My pain (Sophocles, Antigone), 2012. Bottom: marginalia by Meta Glass (detail) in Sophocles, Antigone (New York: American Book Co., 1891), photograph courtesy of Andrea Eis, 2008. All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-14188-6 ISBN (pbk.) 978-0-691-14189-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959621 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion Pro Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Dedicated to my διδάσκαλοι

Contents List of Illustrations

Preface

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xi

Between Alpha and Omega xi Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: Women and the Greek Alphabet An Ode in Greek 1 “Some Greek upon the Margin” 5 “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” Translating Greek Tragedy 26

Chapter One: The Spell of Greek

1

12

35

Virginia Woolf ’s Agamemnon Notebook 35 Cassandra between the Stage and the Page 45 OTOTOTOI 52

ΙΩ

Chapter Two: in Prometheus Bound

57

“So Harsh a Chain of Suffering” 57 Greek Verbs in Me 62 “A Goodly Company of Lady-Translators” 83 The Flight of Io, to America and Back to Greece 95

Chapter Three: The Education of Electra

116

Behold and See 116 Electra at Girton College 124 Electra at Smith College 137

Chapter Four: Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek (with the Accents) 152 New Measures for New Women 152 “A Brisk Interchange of Letters” 155 Euripidean (De)Cadence 163 H.D.’s Euripides: Feet, Feet, Feet, Feet 180

Chapter Five: Dancing Greek Letters Modern Maenads 202 Jane Harrison’s Thrill 209 Bryn Mawr College Rituals 218

Postface

233

Reading the Surface 233 Refractions of Antigone 236 How to Read Ladies’ Greek 242 Notes 247 Bibliography 265 Index 289

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Contents

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Illustrations 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “First Greek Ode” (1819). xx Sara Coleridge, “Translations from the Classics” (1848). 9 “Honour to Agneta Frances Ramsay! (Cambridge, June 1887).” 15 “A Woman’s View of the Greek Question” (1891). 17 Amy Levy, Sketch (ca. 1880). 21 Helen Magill, “The Greek Drama” (1877). 30 Virginia Woolf, Agamemnon Notebook (ca. 1922). 36 Two Cambridge Cassandras from 1900 and 1921. 48 Io in Prometheus Bound (1873). 91 Annie Fields, Greek alphabet (1865). 98 Annie Fields, “The Flight of Io” (1880). 100 Advertisement for Prometheus Bound at Delphi (1927). 113 Eva Palmer Sikelianos with mask of Io (1927). 115 Frederic Leighton, “Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon” (1869). 118 Janet Case as Electra, The Woman’s World (1888). 123 Chorus for Electra at Girton College, “Greek Plays at the Universities,” The Woman’s World (1888). 125 Electra with Orestes and cast in Electra at Girton College (1883). 133 Electra with Chrysothemis in Electra at Girton College (1883). 135 Electra with Paidagogus in Electra at Girton College (1883). 136 Scene from Electra at Smith College (1889). 141 Musical score for Electra at Smith College (1889). 142 Chorus for Electra at Smith College (1889). 145 Pose of Electra with Orestes from Electra at Smith College (1889), juxtaposed with classical sculpture. 146 Playbill for Electra at Smith College (1889). 147 “Electra Album,” Smith College (ca. 1890). 149 A. Mary F. Robinson at the British Museum (1885). 154 A. Mary F. Robinson, letter to John Addington Symonds (1879). 174 “Dance of Maenads” in Margaret Verrall and Jane Harrison, Mythology & Monuments of Ancient Athens (1890). 210 “Maenad” in Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903). 215 Playbill for The Bacchae at Bryn Mawr College (1935). 224 Chorus for The Bacchae at Bryn Mawr College (1935). 225 Eva Palmer Sikelianos, notes for The Bacchae (1934–1935). 226

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5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

Instructions for dancing in The Bacchae (1934–1935). 228 Chorus in The Bacchae at Smith College (1934). 230 Chorus in The Bacchae at Smith College (1934). 230 Chorus in The Bacchae at Smith College (1934). 231 Chorus Leader in The Bacchae at Smith College (1934). 231 “Delicacy of the passive,” marginalia (detail) by Meta Glass in Sophocles, Antigone (ca. 1909). 234 Artwork by Andrea Eis, “Where do the depths come in? (Sophocles, Antigone)” (2008). 235 “St. Valentine’s Day at Girton” (1876). 238 Antigone at Spelman College (1933). 241 “My pain,” marginalia (detail) by Meta Glass in Sophocles, Antigone (ca. 1909). 244 Artwork by Andrea Eis, “My pain (Sophocles, Antigone)” (2012). 245

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List of Illustrations

Preface Between Alpha and Omega “The dear delight of learning for learning’s sake a ‘dead’ language for sheer love of the beauty of its words and the delicacy of its syntactical relations . . . was . . . in a few laggard minds still obscurely is, unwomanly. Why?” Jane Ellen Harrison posed this rhetorical question in Alpha and Omega, published in 1915, toward the end of her years as a classical scholar at Cambridge University. In Ladies’ Greek, I turn the question around in order to ask how the delight of learning a dead language became a mark of “womanly” character. How might we read Harrison’s “Why?” back into the nineteenth century, to learn more about the ways in which women learned to read the Greek alphabet, to discover all the letters between alpha and omega? Why did women in Victorian England and America desire to learn ancient Greek, and how did they turn it into a language of and for desire? What was the appeal of a dead language, written in a strange alphabet and no longer spoken? Women’s desire for Greek was part of a larger culture that believed in building literary character through linguistic discipline, and especially through learning classical languages. In the course of the nineteenth century, during the transition from informal to formal education for women, and the formation of women’s colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, women were drawn to the cultural prestige of Greek studies as one way to justify their claim to higher education. They also cultivated ancient Greek to distinguish a new class of women writers: from the broad literary culture associated with nineteenthcentury “Women of Letters” emerged the “Woman of Greek Letters,” a generic figure mediating between classical literature and its popular reception, between the professionalization of philology and the popularization of classics, between classical literacy and the common reader. Through their mediation of Greek letters, these Anglo-American women became an important medium for classical transmission in the nineteenth century, and well into the next century. My book combines an historical interest in the entry of Victorian women into Greek studies with a literary interest in their translations of Greek tragedy. Of course, they were reading and translating other classical texts as well; the active role played by women in the wide circulation of classics (including Ladies’ Latin alongside Ladies’ Greek) is a topic that deserves further elaboration xi

in books beyond my own. Women’s contribution to nineteenth-century classical discourses has been a focus of ongoing research by scholars such as Mary Beard, Rowena Fowler, Edith Hall, Lorna Hardwick, Fiona Macintosh, and Jennifer Wallace, and has sparked interest among a new generation of critics, such as Isobel Hurst in Victorian Women Writers and the Classics (2006), Shanyn Fiske in Heretical Hellenism (2008), Stefano Evangelista in British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (2009), Tracy Olverson in Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism (2010), Theodore Koulouris in Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf (2011), in a special issue of Women’s Studies edited by Noah Comet on “Nineteenth-century Women Writers and the Classical Inheritance” (2011), and in various contributions to The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 4 (2015). On the other side of the Atlantic, the world of American women’s classicism has been opened up for further exploration by Caroline Winterer in The Mirror of Antiquity (2007), in essays edited by Gregory Staley for American Women and Classical Myths (2008), by Helene Foley in Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the U.S. Stage (2012), and in various contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (2015). Uncovering a multiplicity of materials in order to recover the history of women in classics, this research has called into question a common assumption among classical scholars and cultural historians—including an earlier generation of feminist literary critics—that women were excluded from a “masculine” tradition of classical learning in the nineteenth century. Beyond a broad survey of multiple women or a more narrow focus on individual women within this history, we can now begin to read in further detail exactly how these women engaged with ideas about classical antiquity, and how much they contributed to the idealization of all things Greek. When I started delving into the archives of women’s colleges and literary papers stowed away in libraries and other special collections, my purpose was to find the traces of women writers who learned to read and translate ancient Greek in nineteenth-century England and America. In this respect, and in retrospect, my book is a recovery project with a longer genealogy in feminist literary history. Back in 1984, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published an essay in The Female Autograph, entitled “Ceremonies of the Alphabet,” that began (as I just did) with a quotation from Harrison. They noted that “female artists have long meditated on what Jane Ellen Harrison calls the elements of writing— meditated, that is, on the implications of the alphabet itself, much as Harrison does in ‘Alpha and Omega.’ ” (40) In their own meditation, Gilbert and Gubar asked of the woman writer: “How can she employ the alphabet to perpetuate the most elementary traces of her identity—a meaningful auto-graph?” (26) xii

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At a time when feminist critics were especially interested in claiming the identity of the woman writer and identifying a tradition of women’s writing, that seemed like the right question to ask. But rather than reclaiming the identities of women who are featured in this book, I am more interested in their strange identification with Greek letters, the desire to identify with a dead language not one’s own. Mediated by ancient Greek, the translator’s autograph is the trace of reading and writing something other than the autobiographical identity of the woman writer. It is not my intention to discover the authorial “voices” of these women. Instead I ask, how did they read and translate Greek texts, and how do we read the texts that they read and translated? Their translations confront us with a series of questions, not only about what is being read, but also what resists reading, what can no longer be read, what can never be read. In this encounter with the literality of Greek letters, we see something untranslatable, suspended between knowing and not knowing Greek. By looking closely at women’s textual engagements with Greek tragedy, I offer more detailed literary analysis of materials that are part of the larger cultural history of Victorian Hellenism and the longer history of translating and performing classical drama. I argue that nineteenth-century women writers turned to tragedy in particular as a literary genre for the performance of female classical literacy, dramatizing the encounter with Greek letters as a scene highly charged with eros and pathos. This passionate reading of Greek led them into various forms of translation, turning their favorite Greek tragedies into a creative opportunity for literary transformation, without claiming the authority of classical scholarship. They were amateurs, not philologists: rather than mastering Greek texts as an object of knowledge, they translated tragedy in private and in public in order to perform other ways of “knowing” and “doing” Greek. Emphasizing a range of women’s translational practices, I consider transcriptions, transliterations, transformations, and transpositions of five Greek tragedies in particular: the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, transcribed by Virginia Woolf in one of her reading notebooks (Chapter One); the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, translated by a series of “lady-translators” in England and America (Chapter Two); the Electra of Sophocles, performed in ancient Greek by the ladies of Girton College and Smith College (Chapter Three); the Hippolytus of Euripides, transformed into new lyric meters (Chapter Four); the Bacchae of Euripides, transposed into dancing letters by women posing as modern maenads (Chapter Five). In each chapter I explore translation as a multilayered literary and multifaceted cultural production. Much more than a straightforward movement from one language to another, translating Greek tragedy allowed Preface

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women to move between languages, in a continual mediation between Greek and English, between different modes of reading and writing, and between different media. The traces of these translations are visible in the rich and varied archive of Ladies’ Greek, and my book offers glimpses of materials I have found: manuscripts and marginalia, sketches and photographs, personal diaries and reading journals, old periodicals and books no longer in print. Here we see how women performed female classical literacy, by writing through and around and between the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Introduction opens up this archive as a scene for reading Greek letters, and in my conclusion (“Postface”) I reflect further on archival reading as another performance of translation. What prompted my years of archival research was a growing recognition that my own passionate reading of Greek letters is more than personal; it has a longer history that can be understood according to the conventions of Ladies’ Greek that I identify (with) in this book. Here is one version of that story, both my own and not my own. In The Netherlands my grandfather memorized long passages of Homer in his spare time, and when he saw how much I liked his Greek recitations, he passed along to me his classical texts with marginal notes and sketches that he made as a schoolboy. From my grandmother I heard about a great-aunt named Tante Paula, who knew Latin and some Greek (in the margins) but was too shy to pursue a teaching career in the classroom. My parents learned Greek as part of their Dutch “gymnasium” education, where my mother pursued “alpha” studies in humanities and my father “beta” in sciences. I too learned to love the Greek alphabet at Swarthmore College, from professors I loved: Gil Rose, Martin Ostwald, Lucy McDiarmid, Georgia Nugent, Helen North. The Greek texts I read as an undergraduate made a deep impression on me, especially the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in my Honors Seminar. After graduating I followed in the footsteps of Helen Magill, although her name was unfamiliar to me at the time: a century earlier, she had studied Greek and Latin at Swarthmore College, and then travelled to England to pursue further studies among the first generation of women at Newnham College, Cambridge. I spent two years at Newnham College, walking through those long corridors, past the portrait of a languid Jane Ellen Harrison, and into the lecture halls of Cambridge University, where I heard Raymond Williams lecturing about the ideological and institutional history of the “Tragedy Paper” that is still required for the English Tripos Examinations. I read a lot of Sophocles, as Professor Pat Easterling cheerfully supervised my melancholy reading of Electra, and encouraged me to audition for Sophocles’ Women of Trachis in a xiv

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centenary production of the Cambridge Greek Play in 1983. As a member of the tragic chorus, a giggly group of Cambridge girls, I learned to incorporate metrical recitation of ancient Greek into a choreography of awkward gestures and poses. Like so many Women of Greek Letters before me, I turned to tragedy in particular as a genre to perform (and prove, to some degree) my classical literacy. When I returned to America to earn my doctoral degree in Comparative Literature, I continued my intensive reading of Greek tragedy: with Froma Zeitlin who so brilliantly illuminated the Oresteia, line by line; with Robert Fagles who demonstrated the poetics of translating tragedy, word by word; with Glenn Most who delighted in scanning choral meters, syllable by syllable; and with Anne Carson who looked ever more closely at the Greek alphabet, letter by letter, to see its strangeness. Learning ancient Greek was my rite of passage into an academic career, which began with a doctoral dissertation on Victorian translations of Greek tragedy. And in my subsequent research on women translating Greek tragedy, I have found myself rereading and retranslating some of the same texts that contributed to the formation of my own literary character. More generic than personal, this intellectual autobiography is also a history of the institutions that made me, if not quite a philologist, a scholar involved in reading and teaching classical texts, and interested in learning more about the history of women in classical education.

Acknowledgments I wish to acknowledge the generous institutional and personal support I have received over the years for Ladies’ Greek. Initial research was funded by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. At the University of Michigan, I received several Spring/Summer Research Grants from the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, and the final stages of writing were supported with timely sabbaticals combined with scholarly leave from the College of Literature, Science and the Arts. I am deeply grateful for a Collegiate Professorship that has provided ongoing research support as well as funding for illustrations, permissions, and preparation of the manuscript. Special gratitude goes to the helpful and resourceful archivists I met during my travels to special collections and college archives, including the Berg Collection (New York Public Library), the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin), the Manuscript Collections at Cornell University, the Cambridge Greek Play Archive (Cambridge University Library), Preface

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the Armstrong Browning Library (Baylor University), the Bedford Centre for the History of Women (Royal Holloway), the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Huntington Library, the Schlesinger Library (Harvard University), the Benaki Museum Archives (Athens), Special Collections at the University of Michigan, the National Library of France (Paris), the Beinecke Library (Yale University), the Sophia Smith Collection (Smith College), the Girton College Archive, the Newnham College Archive, the Bryn Mawr College Archive, and the Spelman College Archive. Chapter 1 was previously published as “OTOTOTOI: Virginia Woolf and the naked cry of Cassandra” in Agamemnon in Performance, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 163–185, and is reprinted here (with minor revisions) by permission of Oxford University Press. An early version of Chapter 2 appeared as “The Sexual Politics of Translating Prometheus Bound” in Cultural Critique 74 (Winter 2010): 164–180, and is included here (in expanded form) by permission of the University of Minnesota Press. Chapter 4 includes an article published as “Lady’s Greek (with the accents): A metrical translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson” in Victorian Literature and Culture 34.2 (2006): 591–618, and is reprinted here (with minor revisions) by permission of Cambridge University Press. Excerpts from “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters,” first published in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 43–81, are incorporated into Chapter 5 and my conclusion, by permission from University of Chicago Press. My research for Ladies’ Greek has developed through numerous conference papers and panels, beginning with the first international conference on Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1993 (Armstrong Browning Library) and the conference on American Women and Classical Myth in 1999 (University of Maryland), and continuing in sessions at the American Comparative Literature Association, the Modern Language Association, the North American Victorian Studies Association, and the American Philological Association. I was honored to give guest lectures and keynote presentations as well, at Swarthmore College, Haverford College, UC Berkeley, Birkbeck College, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia University, Kansas State University, Villanova University, University of Georgia, Princeton University, Grand Valley State University, Oxford University, Yale University, Miami University of Ohio (Altman Lecture), the Institute of English Studies (London), Smith College, Northwestern University, Drew University (Shilpa Raval Memorial Lecture), University of Tel Aviv (Martin Ostwald Memorial Lecture), University of Maryland, the Classics Triennial (Cambridge University), and the Cambridge xvi

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Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities. On each of these occasions, I found keen interlocutors and audiences who responded generously to my research and helped me refine my arguments. I have been buoyed over the years by the intellectual engagement and personal encouragement of my beloved colleagues at the University of Michigan, including members of the Department Comparative Literature, the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Classical Studies, the Nineteenth Century Forum, and Contexts for Classics. Rather than naming you individually I thank you, collectively, for ongoing dialogue and collaboration. I am deeply appreciative of the hard work by faculty committees that reviewed my research for promotion, grants, and awards over the years. I appreciate the outstanding work of my graduate student research assistants over the years on this project: Jean Borger, Jessica Roberts, Charles LaPorte, Meilee Bridges, Sheshalatha Reddy, Adam Mazel, Julia Hansen, Mason Jabbari. The dedication of this book to my teachers includes all of my students at the University of Michigan as well, as I have learned much from you over the years. There are colleagues at other institutions I also wish to acknowledge, so many that I can only list alphabetically (with profound gratitude, and equally profound apologies for omissions): Ann Cooper Albright, Isobel Armstrong, Mary Beard, Linda Hunt Beckman, Lee Behlman, Susan Bernstein, Alison Booth, Florence Boos, Kate Bosher, Joseph Bristow, Julia Carlson, Max Cavitch, Michael Cohen, Joy Connolly, Mary Jean Corbett, Emily Dalgano, Richard Dellamora, Cynthia Dessin, Stefano Evangelista, Alice Falk, Shanyn Fiske, Helene Foley, Clare L. E. Foster, Rowena Fowler, Simon Goldhill, Stathis Gourgouris, Susan Gubar, Constanze Guthenke, Edith Hall, Judith Hallett, Betsy Harries, Emily Harrington, Judith Hawley, Renee Hoogland, Linda Hughes, Isobel Hurst, Philip Horne, Leslie Kurke, Jill Lamberton, Miriam Leonard, Margaret Linley, Mary Loeffelholz, Tricia Lootens, Michael Lucey, Deborah Lyons, Fiona Macintosh, Meredith Martin, Richard Martin, Catherine Maxwell, Laura McClure, Denise McCoskey, Meredith McGill, Pantelis Michelakis, Bridget Murnaghan, Cornelia Pearsall, Linda Peterson, James I. Porter, Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Suzanne Raitt, Diane Rayor, Eliza Richards, Adam Roberts, Deborah Roberts, Jason Rudy, Jonah Siegel, Eleni Sikelianos, Alexandra Socarides, Vivasvan Soni, Christopher Stray, Beverly Taylor, Oliver Taplin, Marion Thain, Nancy Worman, Ana Vadillo, Karen Van Dyck, Gonda Van Steen, Jennifer Wallace, Carolyn Williams, Caroline Winterer. I am grateful to the external readers who reviewed the manuscript for publication, and to the editors at Princeton University Press, especially Anne Savarese, for keeping faith in this project. Thanks to Kathleen Cioffi, Jay Boggis, Preface

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and David Luljak for their patience and diligence in preparing, editing, and indexing the book for publication. It seems more than coincidence that assistance with Greek fonts came from Beau Case, a distant relative of Janet Case. And my special thanks to Andrea Eis for sharing with me her work on Meta Glass for  “Marginalia,” and giving permission for images that appear in the Postface of this book. My nearest and dearest have witnessed with love and endured with patience my long labor on Ladies’ Greek. I am blessed with friends who have known me since the early years of my Greek studies, especially Ira Gitlin, Gelina Harlaftis, Tanina Rostain, Rachel Rue, Photini Sinnis, and Wynette Yao. I am grateful to Karin Ahbel-Rappe and Rena Seltzer for their encouragement, and I would not have been able to finish this book without the generous friendship and support of my writing group: Kathryn Babayan, Artemis Leontis, Peggy McCracken, Elizabeth Wingrove. I have been sustained and inspired by the brilliance of Anne Carson and Adela Pinch and the late Patricia Yaeger; also Martin Harries and, as always, Virginia Jackson. I am honored to hold a Collegiate Professorship named after Irene Butter, who sets a radiant example in combining research and teaching and academic service with a broader sense of family, community, and humanitarian goals. I thank my extended family, including my mother Jonny Prins and Dietz Kessler, my brother and sisters with their partners and children, my relatives in the Netherlands, all five Al-Maawi children, and Evelyn Prins Daugherty. Michael Daugherty has created a musical space, literally and figuratively, where we can each work and share life together, alpha to omega.

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Ladies’ Greek

0.1 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “First Greek Ode May 4th, 1819 To Summer.” Holograph poem in Greek. The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Introduction Women and the Greek Alphabet

An Ode in Greek At the age of thirteen, a precocious English girl composed a poem in ancient Greek. Entitled “First Greek Ode May 4th, 1819 To Summer,” the manuscript is difficult to decipher (Figure 0.1).1 Written in awkward letters and riddled with errors, the Greek words appear mostly without accents or other diacritical marks. Here is a transcription, a transliteration, and my version of a “literal” translation: Μουσα καταβε(αινε) αδειν Εξ αναντιας του πολου Μουσα δεομαι σοῦ τοῦτο Κελευε την λυρην αντηχειν Ω Μουσα επιπνε με. Ασπαζω σε ω θερε Ἡ Μουσα ασπαζει σε Ἡ φυσις ασπαζει σε Ὁ κοκκυξ ασπαζει σε Και οἱ αοιδοι των νεμων! Ασπαζω σε ω θερε. Mousa katabe(aine) adein Eks anantias tou polou Mousa deomai sou touto Keleue ten luren antechein O Mousa epipne me. Aspasdo se o there He Mousa aspasdei se He phusis aspasdei se Ho kokkuks aspasdei se Kai hoi aoidoi ton nemon! Aspasdo se o there. 1

Muse descend to sing Down from the sky Muse I beg this of you Command the lyre to resound O Muse inspire me. I welcome you O summer The Muse welcomes you Nature welcomes you The cuckoo welcomes you And the singers of the meadow! I welcome you O summer. The ode begins with an invocation in line 1, where the letter omikron is combined with upsilon in Μουσα, spelling out the name of the Muse. Although the verb katabe(aine) in line 1 has several letters crossed out (by mistake) it seems to be an imperative: “Muse descend to sing” (Μουσα καταβαινε αδειν). Line 2 imagines the Muse appearing “down from the sky” (Εξ αναντιας τοu πολου),2 and in line 3 the Muse is reinvoked with a verb in the first person: “Muse, I beg this of you” (Μουσα δεομαι σοῦ τοῦτο). Perhaps “this” refers back to the previous lines, begging the Muse to make herself visible. Or perhaps “this” refers forward, begging the Muse to make herself audible, as we read in line 4: “Command the lyre to sound” (Κελευε την λυρην αντηχειν). Line 5 repeats the call to the Muse, this time with a vocative that superimposes omega over the capital O: “O Muse, inspire me” (Ω Μουσα επιπνε με). From omikron to omega, little o to big O, the ode asks for inspiration to breathe new life into an ancient language, much as summer breathes life into nature and makes it sing. As a prelude, line 6 modulates from invocation to apostrophe: “I welcome you, O Summer” (Ασπαζω σε ω θερε). Starting in line 7, breathing marks begin to appear for the first time, before the letter eta in Ἡ Μουσα, as if the muse herself is sighing a warm breath in response to summer’s breeze: “The muse welcomes you” (Ἡ Μουσα ασπαζει σε). The verb aspazei recalls the salutation in the epistles of St. Paul, a revelation of the spirit in the letter that is projected here into the natural world, as the verb is repeated in line 8, “Nature welcomes you” (Ἡ φυσιs ασπαζει σε), and again in line 9, “The cuckoo welcomes you” (Ἡ κοκκυξ ασπαζει σε). In line 10 the sound of the cuckoo is amplified into the song of many birds: “And the singers of the meadow!” (Και οἱ αοιδοι των νεμων!). The last line of the ode joins the choir of birdsong by repeating line 6, like a musical refrain: “I welcome you, O Summer” (Ασπαζω σε ω θερε). 2

Introduction

“First Greek Ode” thus performs a rhetorical turn around its own invocation. Beginning and ending in the vocative (Μουσα is the first word, ω θερε the last), it invokes the first songs of summer in order to assert the vocation of the young poet, her own first song. At the bottom of the page, the ode is signed E B Barrett (Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, later known as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or E.B.B). Although its meter is irregular, the ode creates a musical figure for the song of the poet, who tries to warble her own rhythmic cadences as the Greek muse teaches her to sing (adein) along with the poetic birds: in the ode those singers of the meadow are called aoidoi, the Greek word for “poets.” But has ancient Greek been translated into the sounds and rhythms of the world, or does the ode translate the sounds and rhythms of the world into ancient Greek? And can these sounds be heard at all? The lyre that seems to resound in line 4 (αντηχειν, anti + echo) is but an echo of a dead language that is no longer heard or spoken. Letter by letter, word by word, line by line, it is spelled out in a strange alphabet. I came across this lovely ode in girlish Greek when I was leafing through the papers of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the New York Public Library. Copied out by hand on a loose page, this manuscript was carefully preserved as a piece of juvenilia and inserted into her mother’s commonplace book. Although reproduced as a facsimile in a pamphlet from 1971 (“New in the Berg Collection”), and duly noted in 1984 as an entry in The Browning Collections: A Reconstruction with Other Memorabilia, the ode was not translated or collected in any book until its publication in The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 2010, compiled by a team of E.B.B. scholars.3 Their long collective labor of editing the complete poems—the first scholarly edition since 1900, with annotations on manuscript revisions and variant editions—is a feminist project of recovery, discovering new materials and making it possible to read E.B.B. in new ways. But the appearance of this ode in print should not efface the traces of E.B.B.’s handwriting, especially if we want to read her emergence as a Woman of Letters by retracing the outlines of the letters that she wrote in Greek. E.B.B. was spell-bound by ancient Greek for many years. In “Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character,” an autobiographical essay she started writing just a few months after her “First Greek Ode,” she defined her literary character through an intense identification with Greek letters. Having learned to read and write Greek at an early age, first on her own and then with her brother’s tutor, she confessed: “To comprehend even the Greek alphabet was delight inexpressible. Under the tuition of Mr. McSwiney I attained that which I so fervently desired” (350). Ancient Greek became her language of and for desire, as she proclaimed with girlish delight in an escalating series of exclamation Women and the Greek Alphabet 3

points: “To be a good linguist is the height of my ambition & I do not believe that I can ever cease desiring to attain this!! . . . I well remember three years ago ere I had the advantage of Mr. McSwiney’s instruction & crying very heartily for half an hour because I did not understand Greek!!!” (355) E.B.B. went on to cultivate her understanding of Greek with a series of mentors; after grammatical instruction with Mr. McSwiney, she exchanged erudite letters on Greek metrics and the pronunciation of classical languages with Sir Uvedale Price, and in her twenties she read Greek literature together with the blind scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, who liked to call her “Porsonia” (after the English classical scholar, Richard Porson). Having dedicated much of her youth to Greek studies, she wrote to Boyd in 1827: “I intend to give up Greek when I give up poetry; &,—as Porson said on a case equally decided,—“not till then.” Tho’ I never become a critical scholar, I may continue to enjoy that divine poetical literature, for whose sake I encountered the language” (BC 2:56). This passion for Greek is put on display in the manuscript of “First Greek Ode,” where E.B.B. has transformed her early reading of Greek into the poetic performance of her own writing. As “Poet Laureat of Hope End” by the age of eight, E.B.B. had started composing English verses for her family at Hope End Mansion. Between 1815 to 1816 she penned a series of little odes, invoking the muse for her brother’s birthday (“Oh Come Fair Muse, Oh raise thy fondest strain / Come let us hear thy plaintive voice again”), her mother’s birthday (“Come Oh my Muse, Sing of the first of May / . . . And cheer my verses with a bounteous smile / Aurora sings in her triumphal car / And Nature’s Music does the hour beguile”), and her father’s birthday (“Hail dear Papa! I hail thy natal day / The Muses speak my hidden thoughts of love / . . . Sweet Philomel enchants the listening grove / While music’s warblings twitter in her throat”). In 1817 she wrote “The Sorrows of the Muses” as her first long poem (dedicated to her mother), and by 1818 she was writing “The Battle of Marathon” (dedicated to her father and printed for private publication in 1820). Thus, by the time she composed her “First Greek Ode” in 1819, E.B.B. was trying to transpose these classical themes and tropes back into the language from which they were derived: the invocation to the muse, the echoing of her song in nature’s music, the warbling of birds in groves and meadows, as if the whole world could be translated into and out of ancient Greek. Two decades later, in yet another “Biographical Sketch,” E.B.B. described the poetic ambitions of her girlhood with some amusement, as “the narrative of nascent odes epics & didactics crying aloud on obsolete Muses from childish lips.” The muse invoked in her “First Greek Ode” must have seemed the most obsolete of them all, an obscure exercise in a dead language. But reading and 4

Introduction

writing ancient Greek was a formative experience for E.B.B., who remembered her early years at Hope End as “a retirement scarcely broken to me except by books & my own thoughts,” when she “read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian—gathered visions from Plato & the dramatists—eat & drank Greek & made my head ache with it.” (BC 7.353–54) Her desire for Greek was so intense, she fixated on the Greek alphabet and revived it in her thoughts, as if she herself might re-embody this dead language and bring it back to life. As a girl she did not have access to universities such as Oxford, where she might peruse Greek texts alongside students and scholars at the Bodleian Library, but she imagined another locus for reading Greek that took a different form. Reading Greek “under the trees,” in the shadow of her imagination, she lifted archaic letters off the page and projected them out of books and beyond the library, into the inner life of her mind and the life of the world outside her. Not quite dead and not quite alive, ancient Greek seemed to have an afterlife of its own, strangely reanimated.

“Some Greek upon the Margin” The afterlife of Greek letters, variously transliterated, transcribed, translated, transformed, and performed by women in Victorian England and America, is the subject of my book. E.B.B. was not the only one to identify her literary character through identification with ancient Greek. By 1840, she had acquired the reputation of an exceptionally literary woman: “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.”4 But the example of E.B.B. was generic; or rather, her exemplarity was generic in being figured as exceptional. As we shall see, there were many women who cultivated a passionate reading of Greek, and each seemed exceptional in her own way. In their diaries, correspondence, autobiographies, biographies, and other narratives, we encounter again and again a narrative of desire for ancient Greek that has its own predictable topoi: an early encounter with the Greek alphabet, a primal scene of falling in love with the language, a pedagogical experience that revolves around the pain and pleasure of learning to read Greek, an attempt to translate and incorporate Greek into a body of writing, an idea that the woman writer herself might be the very embodiment of Greek letters. In the course of the nineteenth century, learning Greek increasingly served as a rite of passage to become a “woman of letters.” The phrase is a late Victorian invention, but as Linda Peterson has argued, “women of letters flourished throughout the century, as women increasingly conceived of their literary Women and the Greek Alphabet 5

careers and constructed their public personae in a professional mode.”5 The public persona of E.B.B was one of the myths of authorship invoked by and for Victorian women writers, who found in E.B.B. the very personification of a Woman of Greek Letters. E.B.B. herself encouraged this autobiographical fiction in Aurora Leigh, the widely read and often-cited “novel poem” that narrated the story of its eponymous heroine as an aspiring woman writer. In Book I, Aurora narrates how she learned “the trick of Greek” from her father in her youth (I, 714), and how she tried to revive it by imitating Greek poetry in her own English “odes . . . bucolics . . . didactics . . . and elegiac griefs.”6 Although she mocks her own early attempts (“We beat the phormix till we hurt our thumbs,” 1.978) and dismisses earnest invocations to the classical muse (“We call the Muse,—“O Muse, benignant Muse  .  .  . What make-believe!” (1.980, 983), nevertheless her poetic career begins with the incorporation of ancient Greek into her own poetry. Aurora reflects self-consciously on the selfclassicizing ambitions of her literary character: “Oft, the ancient forms / Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood” (1.998–99). It seems thrilling, indeed, for the young Aurora to embody an ancient form at the beginning of Book II. Like the young E.B.B who imagined that “Aurora sings in her triumphal car” in the early ode on her mother’s birthday, a triumphant Aurora proclaims her own name on the morning of her twentieth birthday, at the dawn of her career as a poet. Crowning herself with ivy, she strikes the classical pose of a Poetess and is poised to make her claim to fame, when her cousin Romney discovers her standing alone in the garden: I stood there fixed,— My arms up, like the caryatid, sole Of some abolished temple, helplessly Persistent in a gesture which derides A former purpose. Yet my blush was flame, As if from flax, not stone. ‘Aurora Leigh, The earliest of Auroras!’ (2.60–66) By punning on her name, Romney mocks Aurora’s classical ambition to be among the first (or “earliest”) women poets. Suddenly the thrill of embodying an ancient form feels like the empty gesture of an allegorical figure, and Aurora (“fixed” by Romney’s arresting gaze) is frozen into a statue that serves only as the remainder of “some abolished temple,” no longer standing. Trying to reach out to a vision of an antiquity that has long disappeared, she now seems 6

Introduction

“persistent in a gesture which derides / a former purpose.” In the eyes of Romney, she looks like a caryatid, upholding the ruins of an antiquated faith that is her worship in the temple of all things Greek. Yet the young blood flows through the petrified Aurora to reanimate her ancient form; she is after all a living woman, addressed by a man who makes her blush. He returns to her the book of poems that she had left behind: ‘Here’s a book I found! No name writ on it—poems, by the form; Some Greek upon the margin,—lady’s Greek Without the accents. Read it? Not a word. I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in ’t, Whereof the reading calls up dangerous spirits: I rather bring it to the witch.’ (2.74–79) Even without Aurora’s name inscribed in the book, Romney recognizes it is her writing because of the Greek she has marked, or rather left unmarked, in the margins. He calls it “lady’s Greek without the accents,” suggesting she lacks the education of any English schoolboy: she does not know how to write Greek with the proper diacritical marks, or perhaps she does not know how to mark the quantities of Greek verse for proper pronunciation and metrical scansion. Either way, Romney emphasizes that he has read “not a word” of the English poems and their Greek marginalia in her book. He teases Aurora that “the reading calls up dangerous spirits,” as if Greek letters might have been brought back from the dead to inspire her writing, turning it into a form of witchcraft, or a magic spell. The spell of Greek was played out in many ways and by many women: not one lady’s Greek in the singular, but Ladies’ Greek in the plural. What looked like an individual performance—the scene of Aurora standing alone in the garden to proclaim herself a classical poetess, or the notion that E.B.B. “may justly claim to stand alone” because of her acquaintance with classics—was a collective identification with the Greek alphabet, self-consciously performed by nineteenth-century women of letters. Like E.B.B. who expressed “inexpressible” delight in her early attempts “to comprehend even the Greek alphabet,” these women were fascinated by the literality of Greek letters that simultaneously provoked and resisted translation. For them, the special appeal of ancient Greek was that it remained a dead language, retaining a trace of strangeness that could not be translated into English. Their way of comprehending Greek departed from the disciplinary practice of nineteenth-century philologists, Women and the Greek Alphabet 7

who emphasized mastery of the text as an object of scholarly knowledge. No doubt there was passionate identification with Greek at play in the increasingly specialized discourses of classical scholarship, but the professionalization of philology produced a scholarly relation to ancient Greek and other “dead” languages, through debates about accurate reconstructions, editions, commentaries, and translations of classical texts. By contrast, nineteenth-century women discovered other ways of knowing and desiring Greek, or what Jennifer Wallace calls “the erotics of Greek”: they were “amateurs,” whose love of Greek letters circulated around the boundaries of nineteenth-century philology. It was precisely because these women seemed to have a marginal knowledge of Greek (“Some Greek upon the margin,—lady’s Greek”) that they were able to transform it in their own literary productions. They produced translations and imitations without claiming the authority of classical scholarship, in forms of writing often overlooked by literary critics and cultural historians who were looking for particular kinds of literary or scholarly activity to define “the classical tradition” in Victorian England and America.7 Translating Greek in the margins of that literary history, many women have until recently dropped out of view. And yet the purloined letters of Ladies’ Greek are hidden, in plain sight, in the archives. Like the Greek marginalia in Aurora’s book with “no name writ on it,” women’s transcriptions and translations of Greek can be found in their notebooks and personal correspondence, in student magazines and small literary periodicals, in out-of-print editions or any number of anonymous publications and other miscellaneous manuscripts in the scattered archives of women’s messy, often illegible writing. Consider, for example, a page from the manuscript notebooks of Sara Coleridge, a contemporary of E.B.B. Included in a section that she labeled “Translations from the Classics” is a fair copy of her translation of a choral ode from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus (Figure 0.2).8 The manuscript includes various corrections and revisions, as Coleridge tried to transform the dense metaphorical language of Aeschylean poetry into English verse. On the first page of her translation, she struggled with the simile that compares the sons of Atreus to eagles or vultures circling overhead, trying in vain to protect their young: Like Vultures that around their nest on high Smit by the loss of young with sharpest pain In agitated circles fly And whilst they ply aloft the plumy oar With their shrill sorrows pierce the quiet sky For lone long brooding cares and labour spent in vain. 8

Introduction

0.2 Sara Coleridge, “First Chorus in ‘The Agamemnon.’ ” Page 1 from “Translations from the Classics” in Manuscript Notebook, “Poetry 1823–1851” (Container 3.3). Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

As Coleridge scribbled variations in the right margin (“Smit for their offspring lost, with sharpest pain”) and also in the margin below (“And whilst they row aloft with oary wing / Fills the wide air with their shrill sorrowing”), it would seem that her own translation was also flying “in agitated circles,” lamenting the long brooding over “labour spent in vain.”After eight pages with a list of “Variations” at the end, the incomplete draft ends abruptly; it was never published, and it may be difficult to see why, much less read how, these scribbles are significant. Nevertheless Coleridge’s obscure notebook gives us an insight into the private and public circulation of Ladies’ Greek. In a multilayered reading of her notes, the historical context of the translation is as important as its literary content. Along with her draft, Coleridge also records how her translation was interrupted in 1848, by an invitation to review The Princess, Tennyson’s new poem about women’s education: Women and the Greek Alphabet 9

I was at that time intent upon translating the “Agamemnon” of Aeschylus into verse. I have since thought that my time would have been better employed in the mere attempt at an Aeschylean translation, than in criticizing Tennyson’s “Princess.” . . . I cannot think “The Princess” will ever hold a higher rank amongst the works of genius than I assigned it in consequence of the explanation that Gama means the Spirit of the Age, and Ida—I protest I know not what she was said to personify. Perhaps she was the Spirit of the Age and Gama that of the Age gone by—But I talk in the dark and it matters not. What I meant to record only was that, as the critique of the Princess appeared in the Quarterly of March 1848, I broke off my Agamemnon attempt just before, and never afterwards had leisure to resume it. In The Princess, King Gama is persuaded by his daughter to found a women’s college, where Princess Ida presides until it falls to ruin. Uncertain what kind of woman Princess Ida was “said to personify” (does she embody the new Spirit of the Age, or its failure?), Coleridge gave Tennyson’s poem a mixed review, noting his “pretty mockery of feminine pretensions to learning and argument” as well as the “lovely imagery” in his “description of undergraduate relaxation in the gardens of Ida’s college.”9 In her notebook, she reflected further on women’s aspirations to higher learning, so dramatically disrupted in Tennyson’s poem, as an interruption of her own exercise in higher learning as well: “I broke off my Agamemnon attempt just before, and never afterwards had leisure to resume it.” What is left of her “Agamemnon attempt” is transcribed in the notebook, with this prefatory note and an allusion that is translated (wittily? wistfully? wryly? wearily?) from the prologue to this Aeschylean tragedy: “—But I talk in the dark and it matters not.” Even if Coleridge’s Greek translation never saw the light of day, it does matter. It survives in the material form of her notebook, where we can see how Coleridge (like Aurora Leigh) performed “the trick of Greek” that she learned from her father. In the case of Coleridge the father was not a fiction: Samuel Taylor Coleridge had elaborate theories about how to teach ancient Greek, as he planned a grammar book in which Part I would be “the Principles of Universal Grammar” exemplified in the juxtaposition of Greek and English, and Part II would be “Greek lessons, methodically selected and arranged.”10 His pedagogical scheme never came to fruition, and he left the tutoring of his daughter mostly to others, but she inherited his passion for Greek and proved quite a prodigy. According to the Memoir and Letters later published by her own daughter, Sara Coleridge’s “favorite pursuits were chiefly literary and linguistic. Before she was 10

Introduction

five-and-twenty she had made herself acquainted with the Greek and Latin Classics, and was well-skilled in French, Italian, German, and Spanish. These acquirements were mainly the result of her own efforts.”11 Coleridge went on to marry a Greek scholar (her cousin Henry Coleridge, whose “compositions ‘chiefly on classical subjects’ . . . formed a topic of common interest”), and she took an active interest in the classical education of her children. In her correspondence, we find a list of her opinions on a variety of pedagogical topics, including “Reasons Why the Greek and Latin Poets Ought to Form Part of the Course of School Instruction,” “Love of Books as a Source of Happiness, and Likely to be Increased by Classical Studies,” and “Value of the Greek Language as an Instrument of Mental Cultivation.” On the last of these topics, she wrote to a female friend: “I wish very much that some day or other you may have the time to learn Greek, because that language is an idea. Even a little of it is like manure to the soil of the mind, and makes it bear finer flowers.”12 Manure to the soil of the mind, indeed: for Coleridge, learning ancient Greek was not only a way to cultivate the mind and make it flower, but the very ground of thought. According to her “idea” of the language, translation would grow naturally out of a process of reading and writing Greek. In drafting a series of revisions of the choral ode from Aeschylus in her notebook, Coleridge performed a complex interaction with the text, simultaneously reading Greek through English and English through Greek, continually rethinking her understanding of each language in relation to the other. Furthermore, this selfrevising translation produced a way of knowing Greek that did not make it simply the object of knowledge, but rather made it possible to think about the very question of knowability, what could be known and what would remain unknown. “Things of the mind and intellect give me intense pleasure; they delight and amuse me as they are in themselves,” Coleridge wrote in her autobiography, preferring the process of thinking rather than its completion: “whatever subject I commence, I feel discomfort unless I could pursue it in every direction to the farthest bounds of thought.” This was Coleridge’s way of thinking about Greek as well, allowing Greek letters to “delight and amuse me as they are in themselves” and pursuing their translation “to the farthest bounds of thought” without reaching a conclusion. These same sentences were quoted by Virginia Woolf in her essay on Coleridge’s autobiography, which Coleridge left unfinished much like the Greek translations in her notebook. “Sara’s mind wandered,” Woolf wrote: “she was diffuse, unable to conclude.”13 But Woolf was sympathetic to modes of thinking that did not insist on concluding, both in her essay on Coleridge and even more famously in her essay “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925). Here Woolf pursued Women and the Greek Alphabet 11

her own exploration of “the farthest bounds of thought,” by meditating on moments in ancient Greek when “the meaning is just on the far side of language.” Like Coleridge, she saw in Greek an opportunity to reflect on the movement of the mind, exemplified by Aeschylus in particular: “He will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge and make it bold.”14 So also the experience of reading and translating Aeschylus might give us “not the thing itself ” but its “reverberation and reflection,” simultaneously “close enough to the original” and also “remote enough” to allow the language to reverberate soundlessly in the mind. Woolf ’s imagination of ancient Greek moved toward an ideal of pure literality, writ large in the mind’s eye by the desire to “heighten, enlarge and make it bold.” In my first chapter, we will return to Woolf, whose famous essay “On Not Knowing Greek” is a powerful meditation on Greek as a language for not knowing. Her articulation of Ladies’ Greek is critical throughout the following chapters of my book, where I read different encounters with the literality of Greek letters. My central claim, however, is that this idea of Greek was not peculiar to Virginia Woolf, or Sara Coleridge, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but part of the larger nineteenth-century legacy of women for whom translation, in all its various forms, was a performance of “not knowing” Greek even while desiring to know it. As I try to read such strange scenes of reading, my second claim is that this idiosyncratic approach to Greek was played out not only in the mind of the solitary reader. The encounter with Greek letters so often described by Women of Letters, with all its imaginary and real implications, was enacted within a larger matrix of cultural practices, social networks, and institutional structures, during a time when women were making a transition from informal education to more formal education in universities. Out of their reinvention of female classical literacy emerged the culture that I call “Ladies’ Greek.”

“Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” To locate the scene of reading within historical sites for learning Greek, my research has focused on the culture of Ladies’ Greek in and around women’s colleges in England and America. Here the cultivation of Greek played an important role in debates about the higher education of women. Their interest in classics was, of course, a form of class identification that turned the Greek alphabet into a sign of advanced literacy, allowing Greek letters to be mobilized for upward mobility and to be personified as an idealized, feminine figure: an 12

Introduction

aesthetic ideal that was whitened, like the nineteenth-century imagination of Greek statues, to create an elite culture for (mostly) white women of privilege. I return here to one place of special privilege in the broader cultural imaginary of Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Cambridge. From the first generation of women who studied Greek there, I present four “representative” figures in order to sketch out some of the new discourses and debates that were circulating through these women, around the boundaries of classical scholarship, around the boundaries of the university, and around both sides of the Atlantic. Shaped by polemics about “knowing” Greek among classical scholars within the institution, these four women also show us how Ladies’ Greek departed from such claims to knowledge, allowing them to “do” Greek differently as a theory and practice of not knowing. “Now and for us it is a time to Hellenise and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised too much and have over-valued doing,” Matthew Arnold wrote in his Preface to Culture and Anarchy in 1869, proclaiming Victorian Hellenism at its height. Whether women were included in Hellenising “now” and “for us” was open for debate, however. This was the year Girton College opened its doors for women to study at Cambridge University, under the leadership of Emily Davies. Opposing the creation of any special system of education for women, she insisted they follow the same curriculum of study as the male undergraduates. Her vision of women’s education was simultaneously radical and conservative, as her insistence on educational equality also meant a resistance to curricular reform. This was also the time when the compulsory Greek debates were starting up at Cambridge (questioning whether Greek should be a required subject in the “Little-Go,” the Previous Examination required for entrance into the “Tripos” Examinations for an honors degree).The intensity of both debates— about the place of women in higher education and the place of classics in the curriculum—converged in “The Girton Girl,” who became a popular icon for the entry of women into Greek studies. In “doing” Greek at Cambridge did they make a claim to “knowing” it as well? And was their cultivation of Greek the kind of knowing that Arnold wanted to claim for Hellenism? The question of Greek—with its multiple and often contradictory significations—was hotly contested within Victorian Hellenism, and especially in Victorian Cambridge, as Simon Goldhill has argued: “This is never merely a question of linguistic competence or training. Rather a host of political, cultural and personal politics make ‘knowing’ Greek a very complex idea indeed.”15Analyzing the passionate polemics around classical education among Cambridge scholars and other Victorian men of letters, Goldhill notes that “the specific question of what it means to ‘know Greek’ is constantly framed—though not Women and the Greek Alphabet

13

contained—by the history of education” (194), and he emphasizes “the range of positions available in such debate about ‘knowing’ Greek” (196). Within his longer cultural history of Hellenism, Goldhill’s chapter on nineteenth-century struggles around “Greekness” concludes: There’s no knowing Greek—no knowing—without desire. A desire that is not just a wish for social or intellectual achievement, but a self-consuming, self-forming interest, informed by the exchanges of status, power, cultural regulation and social expectation. That’s why the simple question ‘Do you know Greek’? can never have a simple answer. (245) Ringing various changes on the title of his chapter (“Who Knows Greek?”), Goldhill defines the cultural politics of Greek in terms of the dynamic debates around knowing Greek and the complication of different claims to knowledge: never a simple answer, but also, never a simple question. We can approach the gender politics of Ladies’ Greek through the related, but different, question of “not knowing.” Although Victorian women of letters do not figure in Goldhill’s account of Victorian Cambridge, certainly their desire for Greek was also regulated by status, power, social expectation; beyond linguistic competence or intellectual achievement, their Greek studies also served to define a “self-consuming self-forming interest.” But the self that was being formed, or consumed, through Ladies’ Greek was not a male subject, and the identification of a female subject with debates about knowing Greek produced a different relation to the institution, where status and power were exchanged in the name of scholarly identity and the institutional production of knowledge. It is not possible to exchange women’s names for the names of men in this story without further differentiating the forms of desire inflected by gender, and pointing to a knowing that was shaped by more diffuse and open-ended interactions often played out in the margin of institutional discourses. The very terms of exchange and exchangeability, in other words, need to be probed, if we want to understand the formation of a female subject whose claim to individual identity or personal agency was mediated by the collective practice of Ladies’ Greek. How do we read the image of Agnata Frances Ramsay, for example, the iconic Girton Girl who was widely celebrated for her triumph in the Cambridge Classical Tripos in 1887?16 Because she was the first woman to achieve top honors in Part I of Tripos Examination (the linguistic part most difficult for women), she was featured in a drawing by Du Maurier in Punch (Figure 0.3). As the only student to be ranked in the First Division of the First Class in the First Part of 14

Introduction

0.3 “Honour to Agneta Frances Ramsay! (Cambridge, June 1887).” Punch (July 2, 1887): 326.

the Classical Tripos that year, Ramsey is seen entering the “First Class” compartment of a train, marked “Ladies Only.” But since women and men were classed separately in the examination lists, the train compartment also marks her institutional segregation from the male students who took the same examination: if any of them had ranked in the First Division, she would not have appeared at the top of the list. Ushered into the train by Punch (dressed as an obsequious don, hats off to her) and a dancing dog, Ramsay is a reminder of Samuel Johnson’s famous words that an educated woman preaching is like a circus dog performing tricks. The implications of the cartoon are ambiguous. Is Ramsey the exception that proves the rule? Does she merely imitate what her master has trained her to do? What is the end stop for the “Ladies’ Only” train? Is she stepping into a scholarly career in Classics, or will she be derailed? Although Ramsay is dressed in full student regalia, and went on to successful completion of Part II of the Tripos, women did not receive University degrees until 1948. Simultaneously included in and excluded from the institution, Ramsay’s identification with classical scholarship was all in the family: as the daughter of a classical scholar, and later the wife of another, she became known for her scholarly edition of a book of Herodotus. But with her back turned in the cartoon, she remains an enigmatic figure: not quite anonymous, yet faceless. The depiction of Ramsay in Punch suggests many ambivalences about the desirability of classical education for women, and the ambiguities of their desire Women and the Greek Alphabet

15

for Greek. Whose desire was it? Was it the personal assertion of individual women’s desires, or a public rejection of the university’s desires to identify Greek with “Men Only,” or a collective projection of Girton’s desires for a collegiate identity through identification of Greek with “Ladies Only”? Although other women before Ramsay excelled in Tripos Examinations in various subjects, she became the image of “the first” woman to get “the first” in Classics, “the first” serious subject for women to study at Girton, “the first” of the women’s colleges at Cambridge. (The cartoon still hangs in the front hall of Girton College and can be viewed on its website.) The popular circulation of the image both within and beyond the university makes it possible to see how the imagining of Ladies’ Greek—the “examination” of Greek knowledge, and also what it might mean for women to know Greek and to examine their own knowing of Greek—was simultaneously under- and over-determined. Ramsay was “a” first, but she was not “the” first. She was preceded by a variety of women who achieved success in Classics at Cambridge, including the illustrious Jane Ellen Harrison from Newnham College. In 1879 she was among the first generation of women to complete the Classical Tripos (not yet divided into two parts), and she received the highest marks that year in the philosophy exam. Although Harrison was passed over for a teaching position at Newnham in 1880 and (twice) for the Yates professorship in archaeology at the University of London, she finally returned to Newnham in 1898 as another “first,” proclaimed to be the first “professional” female classicist. But rather than a forward progression into the profession of classical scholarship at Cambridge, as Harrison’s biography is often narrated, her career (like her way of “knowing” Greek) was more circuitous. During nearly two decades in London, she had established a different reputation as an independent scholar by lecturing at various museums and writing about ancient Greece for academic publication as well as for circulation in popular periodicals (like The Woman’s World and The Quarterly Review). Before returning to teach at Cambridge, she offered courses at the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, where she inspired her students with passion for Greek; in 1888 one of her courses began with questionnaire, asking: “Do you know Greek? If not, you are strongly advised to spend a few hours in learning the letters in order to make out easy inscriptions.”17 Even more than Ramsay (faceless in Punch), Harrison emerged as the public face of Ladies’ Greek, as we see in an 1891 interview from The Pall Mall Gazette (Figure 0.4). The first page of the interview sets the scene for a double encounter that transforms the meeting with Harrison into “the occasion ‘when Greek meets Greek.’ ” In a room where “the very air . . . breathed antiquity,” Harrison 16

Introduction

0.4 “A Woman’s View of the Greek Question (Interview with Jane Harrison),” Pall Mall Gazette (November 4, 1891): 1.

seems a living Greek whose “enthusiasm” breathes new life into the dead language: she is “the lady to whose lectures during the last ten years the revival of popular interest in ancient Greece is almost solely due.” Harrison seems more vivid than the artifacts and representations of Greece that surround her: “a fine photograph of the Parthenon,” “a piece of mummy cloth,” “strange vases and pots,” “books and pamphlets innumerable concerning the ancient Greeks,” all of which come to life in her imagination. “Lost in admiration of something” when the interview begins, Harrison emerges from her studious reverie long enough to ask, “Isn’t it beautiful?” Indeed she personifies the revival of interest in ancient Greece, as the picture of “Miss Jane Harrison” featured in the article looks youthfully Greek, with a distinctly classical nose, in contrast to “the picture of a yellowish, noseless, and otherwise rather decrepit old Greek” that she presents to her interviewer. The disfigured face in the picture seems to produce the idealized, classicized, feminized figure of Harrison herself, whose eye (and nose) for Greek defines her aesthetic perception of Greek antiquity. Women and the Greek Alphabet 17

Harrison’s aesthetic contemplation of all things Greek is also a pedagogical encounter, since the scene includes one of “Miss Harrison’s pupils who have made Greek life and art their ‘professional study.’ ” The quotation marks around “professional” suggest they profess a version of classical scholarship on the boundaries of the profession: Miss Jane Harrison lectures to popular audiences and Miss Millington Lathbury “has just been appointed Lecturer to the Oxford Society for the Extension of University Teaching.” Although the location of these “two ladies bent together over a book of daintily coloured plates” is not specified, it suggests a feminine space, more private than public, where a relation of intimacy is played out through identification with Greek. Yet as the title of the article suggests, Harrison is also a public persona who can provide “A Woman’s View of the Greek Question.” “Of course, Miss Harrison,” the interviewer asks, “with your enthusiasm for Greek you are all for retaining the study of the language at the Universities?” And she replies, “I hardly know what to think at present.” Simultaneously proclaiming to know and not to know, she responds with a personal rather than a professional opinion: “Personally, I must confess to a pretty strong prejudice in favour of ‘compulsory Greek.’ ” The interview with Harrison creates a gendered perspective—the view of a woman who embodied “The Greek Question” for women, both its subject and its object—on debates about classical education, as seen both inside and outside the institutional politics of Greek studies (including Harrison’s own) at Cambridge. The interview continues on other topics, but this opening vignette in The Pall Mall Gazette incorporates many of the features I associate with Ladies’ Greek: the identification with a dead language, the personification of Greek letters, the “revival” of Greek for popular appeal, the idealization of classical beauty, the creation of a feminized marginal space, the implicit erotics of Greek pedagogy, the absorption of knowledge into aesthetic perception, the suspension between knowing and not knowing. When Harrison returned to Cambridge in 1898, she continued her self-conscious performance of Ladies’ Greek within the institutional setting of Newnham College, even while redefining herself as a “professional” scholar in the university. At Cambridge she was known for the performative drama of her lectures, and the literary performativity of her scholarly prose often took priority over philological expertise. Thus Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and Harrison’s close friend and collaborator, remembered her as “a teacher who combined certain minor defects, due in part to a lack of early training in the drudgery of exact scholarship and in part to a natural impulsiveness, with a width of learning, a force of historical imagination, and an infectious interest in her subject which amounted to genius.”18 Mary Beard points out that Murray’s memorial 18

Introduction

lecture is “one of the founding texts of the story—perhaps, better the myth—of Jane Harrison,” as Murray glossed over her years in London in order to launch “one of the orthodox narratives of Harrison’s scholarly career,” her emergence as a brilliant and influential figure among The Cambridge Ritualists.19 Calling into question some of those orthodoxies in The Invention of Jane Harrison, Beard delves back into the archives in order to discover “a different place for her in the history of classics” as a “series of competing narratives, a battleground of biographies” (11), and to interrogate how and why Harrison “remains the most famous female classicist there has been, an originary and radical thinker, a permanent fixture in the history of scholarship” (162). But the invention of Jane Harrison was not only the invention of Jane Harrison. If she transformed (as Murray recalled) the “minor defects” of her training and the “drudgery of exact scholarship” into an impulsive, passionate, and imaginative reading of Greek, it was more than the expression of her individual genius. The originality of her imagination emerged from a late-nineteenthcentury culture of women’s “high amateurism,” as described by Bonnie Smith in The Gender of History. According to Smith, “amateurs articulated liminality that worked to mark out the boundaries, spaces, and locations of femininity,” and in reconstructing the multilayered methodologies and multiple genres used by female amateurs writing history in the late nineteenth century, Smith emphasizes the importance of reading their work on its own terms: not a crisis point or transition in the professionalization of knowledge, but an opening into new lines of inquiry and forms of knowing: “The amateur expanded cognition to include aesthetic, emotional, and kinetic registers, constructing these within a historical knowledge that was—and remains—beyond the horizons of the professional.”20 So also Harrison, not quite a “sound scholar” by her own admission, played on the aesthetic, emotional, and kinetic registers of classical scholarship. Even after twenty years at Cambridge, at the heart of the institution, she could suddenly proclaim with extravagant passion that she was falling in love with Russian, just as she first “fell in love suddenly, hopelessly” with ancient Greek: “What was the spell cast by Greek?” she asked in “Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos” (a 1919 Cambridge pamphlet not nearly as dry as its title), self-consciously situating an amateur’s passion for strange alphabets within, but also before and beyond, the disciplinary formation of the Cambridge Classical Tripos. Of course, not all women at Cambridge were quite so enchanted with the Classical Tripos, and few were as successful as Ramsay at Girton or Harrison at Newnham, who were made to exemplify and indeed personify the classical ambitions of their respective colleges. There were other, more marginal figures Women and the Greek Alphabet

19

like Amy Levy, one of the first Jewish women to study in Cambridge. She pursued classical and modern languages at Newnham College from 1879 to 1881, and during this time she also published “Xantippe,” a dramatic monologue in which the embittered wife of Socrates narrates her exclusion from the philosophical dialogues between men in his inner circle. Complaining that “my soul which yearned for knowledge, for a tongue / that should proclaim the stately mysteries” has been left uneducated, she proclaims an ironic variation on the Socratic credo, “I know only that I do not know.” Unable to proclaim the mysteries, her Greek tongue has turned into a woman’s shrewish tongue, turning Xantippe into a figure for Levy’s sense of double marginalization, as a Jew and as a woman at Cambridge.21 The stories, poems, and comic sketches that she drafted in her student notebooks illustrate a more satirical perspective on the cult of Classics at Cambridge, including her own desire to learn Greek: she too identified with Greek letters as a way to define her literary character. The selfmockery is visible in a comical sketch by Levy of five young women, including herself, with their Greek tutor, Mr. Jenkinson of King’s College (Figure 0.5). In the mock-Socratic dialogue of this pedagogical scene, the caricature of Jenkinson asks in ancient Greek, “O wretched girl, what is this?” The caricature of Levy is placed at the bottom of the page below her tutor, in submission to his mastery, as she responds in garbled Greek: “I do not know, master.” Unable to translate the text she holds in her hands, she marks her failure as a Woman of Greek Letters: Levy’s Greek is not quite “Lady’s Greek without the accents,” but in the margins of her notebook it is written inaccurately, with the wrong accents.22 The sketch also accentuates Levy’s lower place in the hierarchy of other female students. Their straight “Greek” noses contrast with her “Jewish” nose, marking a racial/ethnic/cultural difference from the classical beauty of their profiles. They anticipate the idealized illustration of Harrison in The Pall Mall Gazette, and although it is unlikely that Harrison was in their class (in every sense), the face of Greek is familiar enough: it illustrates an aesthetic of whiteness that is identified with Greekness, from which Levy is excluded. Is the imperfection of Levy’s Greek knowledge embodied in the imperfect beauty of her female figure, or is it the imperfection of her awkwardly figured body that makes her unable to know what they know? Yet the silence of the other students is ambiguous, as they seem to embody Greek without speaking it. Perhaps they know more Greek, or less, since Levy is the one to answer the question “what is it?” in her own version of Ladies’ Greek, no matter how imperfect. Even in disclaiming knowledge of Greek, she is illustrating another way to know Greek, simultaneously identifying with Greek letters and disavowing that personification. 20

Introduction

0.5 Amy Levy, Sketch (ca. 1880). Amy Levy Archive, Private Collection, England.

Levy’s canny use of Greek provides us with another perspective—not an answer, but a different question—on “A Woman’s View of The Greek Question” that circulated in the popular imagination. In an unpublished story entitled, “Lallie: A Cambridge Sketch,” Levy created a female literary character who wonders whether “happiness depends on one’s knowledge of the classics,” and in the draft of a verse drama entitled “Reading,” the characters also wonder whether learning Greek leads to happiness. A student from “Newnham Hall” named “Janet Gerund” struggles with Greek, lamenting her “poor efforts” in “faulty Attic, over which my brain / Has been a-boiling since the morn; Refrain / I beg from reading!” Hovering (like the gerund of her name) over the reading of Greek, she finds it difficult to put into practice. Levy’s own response to this difficulty was to refrain, as she left Newnham College after two years without sitting for examinations: having done Greek, her way of “doing” Greek was to reflect on its failure. Contemporaneous with Levy at Newnham was another figure on the margins of Victorian Cambridge: Helen Magill also aspired to a career in classical scholarship, without much success. As the first American woman to take the Women and the Greek Alphabet 21

Classical Tripos Examination, in 1881, she barely squeaked by with a “Third Class” and returned to America in disappointment. But according to the only existing biography of Magill, she was “as fascinating in failure as she was singular in success.”23 She had already distinguished herself as the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in America, awarded by Boston University in 1877 for her dissertation on Greek tragedy. Magill began intensive studies in Classics at Swarthmore College, where her father Edward Magill (then president of the college) encouraged Quaker self-discipline in her desire for ancient Greek. The Magill family at Swarthmore College was part of a progressive movement in America for the higher education of women, articulated by T.W. Higginson in his influential 1859 essay, “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” Widely circulated and later reprinted in Common Sense for Women (1881), his essay was an inspiration for the formation of women’s colleges in America, where his plea for equal education was transformed from the “common sense” of common literacy into a claim for the advanced literacy of classical education. Like other American women of her generation, Magill was firm in the conviction that women “ought” to learn the Greek alphabet. At Swarthmore College she read Greek until her eyes hurt, as she transferred her passion for the language to a grand passion (“strong, unreasoning, overmastering”) for her professor of Greek, William Hyde Appleton.24 After receiving her degree from Swarthmore in 1873, she read in the pages of the Woman’s Journal about Higginson’s efforts to open the doors of Harvard for the higher education of women, but when she was denied admission there, Magill had to settle for graduate studies in comparative philology at Boston University: “Blessed Utopia” she called it. B.U. proved less than utopian, however, because it lacked a rigorous graduate curriculum. Although her completion of the Ph.D. was announced in The Woman’s Journal, she did not feel sufficiently authorized to name herself “Dr. Magill.” As America’s answer to “A Woman’s View on the Greek Question,” she set off for Newnham College, where she published a detailed account of her academic progress in The Atlantic Monthly in 1878.25 Cambridge proved a more rigorous challenge: “In spite of all the work which I have already done in America in the classics,” she reported, “I cannot stand among my equals in two years and not probably in three, because my preparation is not such as to give me a fair start.”26 Eager to make herself another “first” in the public eye, Magill nevertheless resolved to prepare for the Classical Tripos. In personal journals and letters she recorded the pains and pleasures of her studies: “If this does not kill me, I believe it will make me stronger and better, more of a woman,” she wrote in her diary. She pursued Greek with a tutor in Greek at Trinity College, Richard 22

Introduction

Dacre Archer-Hind (“Has not he a name?” she quipped, “It represents an entire hunting scene, pursued and pursuer”).27 After struggling through the Agamemnon in Greek, Magill described herself as “very stupid in class—had to have the same thing explained seventeen times and then didn’t understand very well. Poor Mr. A-H had a hard time but was very politic. Finished the Ag. at last!!! No I can’t believe it. Began in October growing stupider and lazier every day. Think two years will be enough to forget all I have ever learned. Poor Tripos!”28 At the dreaded Classical Tripos Examination, she blanked out. Despite reassurances from Archer-Hind that her philosophy paper had been “very good” and some of the Greek translations “very fair,” she was crushed by her failure in rhetoric and prose composition. Although Magill’s “knowledge” of Greek did not make the grade in Cambridge, she knew enough to recognize that knowing Greek in a different way would make all the difference. Back in America, she taught for several years at Howard Collegiate Institute and at the women’s annex to Princeton, and developed her own ideas about the study of classical languages. In notes for a public lecture, she maintained that “Latin and Greek are by far the best instruments for training the mind in grammar and its logic, but this training should not come first. Every language should be studied as an art before it is studied as a science.”29 Distinguishing between the process of knowing and the production of grammatical knowledge, she emphasized that “the two studies are entirely distinct and I believe that classical scholarship has lost much by so often failing to recognize this fact. Doubtless the very best way of studying a language, as such, is that where no word of grammar is never heard, nor of any interpretations except that which the mind gradually forms from the light thrown by one word upon another.”30 To encourage a “vivid” interest in dead languages, she argued that the reader should learn to see words in their own light rather than through the lens of translation. In her view, “there is no such thing as real translation; all translation is a makeshift,” and for this reason “the habit of reading without consciously translating must be cultivated by every means,” allowing readers to “take the thoughts as the ancient gives them and hold the mind in that ancient attitude of suspended judgment.” In the suspension between knowing and not knowing, the light of the language would be revealed. Despite her “failure,” Magill successfully embodied Ladies’ Greek for circulation in America, and she succeeded in doing so at a critical moment in the ongoing intercollegiate exchange between American and English women. Other Americans followed in her footsteps, among them the more “successful” Emily Smith (who studied Classics at Girton from 1889 to 1891 and later became dean of Barnard College) and M. Carey Thomas (who visited Cambridge Women and the Greek Alphabet 23

several times after becoming dean of Bryn Mawr College in 1884, and president in 1894). For women who were forming the institutions of higher education, Classics at Cambridge served the purpose of “doing” as much as “knowing,” notwithstanding Arnold’s claim that “we have over-valued doing.” Like others of her generation, Magill went on to publish articles and present lectures to the American public about the education of women. An article on “Woman’s Work in the Nineteenth Century” by “Professor Helen Magill,” was accepted by Higginson for publication in The Independent in 1882, and he invited her to deliver a paper on “Progress in the Education of Women” at the annual meeting of the American Social Science Association in 1887. She concluded her lecture with a rhetorical flourish in Greek: For how many years must we turn from the doors of these our native institutions to those more generous and more just of our mother country? What can we do which will go further toward opening these and other universities? I will give you three answers. In the first place improve our scholarship, in the second place improve our scholarship and again improve our scholarship. We may have as much now as the men who are admitted. Very well, if enough will not do let us give them more than enough. καλὸν γᾶρ τὸ ἆθλον καὶ ἡ ἐλπίς μεγάλη.31 She may (or may not) have translated the Greek for her audience: “for beautiful is the reward and the hope is great.” Although some of her own great hope had not been rewarded, she still identified herself as a Woman of Greek Letters and performed this personification for her audience, which included Higgingon himself. This conference was also the occasion for meeting Andrew Dickson White, the co-founder and first president of Cornell University, who was strong in support of co-education for women. (Reader, she married him.) Agnata Ramsay, Jane Harrison, Amy Levy, Helen Magill: they were the public face, and just a few of the many faces, of women’s education at a time when it was increasingly personified through Greek. Of course there are more stories to be told about other Women of Letters who learned Greek, within and beyond Cambridge, in private and public universities, in the cities and in the provinces, on both sides of the Atlantic. Even before the formation of women’s colleges, women were learning Greek outside of the university in a range of educational settings, including private tutorials and primary or secondary schools. For example, Miss Anna Swanwick, who helped to found Bedford College for Women in 1849 in London, first learned the Greek alphabet from a schoolboy and went on to pursue independent studies in ancient and modern languages in Berlin, 24

Introduction

before going on to become an eminent Victorian translator of Aeschylus.32 And in America, as Mary Kelly has demonstrated, young women were already pursuing an ambitious educational agenda at the female seminaries during the first half of the nineteenth century.33 Thus Elizabeth Cady Stanton, after learning Greek with her family’s pastor and receiving a prize in Greek at school, went on to attend the Female Seminary at Troy, where women were learning classical languages (albeit more Latin than Greek); in her memoir, she recalled how she “decided to study Greek” as one of her “resolutions never to be forgotten, destined to mold my character anew.”34 More than a private passion, this desire for Greek was part of a collective identification with Greek letters that Anglo-American women recirculated for different purposes. For many it was a performance of white womanhood, undeniably with racial implications, as the discourses of nineteenth-century Hellenism were often intertwined with Aryan ideologies: to “do” Greek was to “be” a white woman of a particular class. But precisely because of these ideological associations, Ladies’ Greek could also be mobilized in other directions, moving across categories of race and class to redefine female character. In A Voice from the South: By a Woman of the South, for example, Anna Julia Cooper appealed to Greek ideals in her famous plea for the higher education of African American women. Beginning with a familiar question—“Shall Woman Learn the Alphabet”—she introduces a series of elaborate rhetorical maneuvers in “The Higher Education of Women” in order to transform a call for basic literacy in every single woman into an even more ambitious claim to classical literacy uniting all women.35 She proclaims a lineage of educated women from antiquity to the present, by invoking classical figures like Sappho and Aspasia as a prototype for “women who can think as well as feel, and who feel nonetheless because they think” (59). And to prove herself this type of woman, Cooper offers her own education as example. Born in 1858 as the daughter of a slave and a white landowner in North Carolina, she recounts her early schooling in Ralegh: when it was announced that “finally a Greek class was to be formed,” she replied, “humbly I hope, as became a female of the human species—that I would like very much to study Greek, and that I was thankful for the opportunity” (76–77). This humility came with grand ambition, as Cooper went on to pursue “The Gentleman’s Course” at Oberlin College from 1881 to 1884, where she chose the “classical” curriculum for male students rather than the “literary” curriculum for the women. As a teacher and writer, she went on to become the public face of black female intellectuals and a popular orator on both sides of the Atlantic, invited to speak at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women Women and the Greek Alphabet 25

in Chicago, and in London at the first Pan-African Conference in 1900. By way of her classical education, Cooper became a “representative” woman who embodied other ways of “knowing” and “doing” Ladies’ Greek.36 In the chapters to come, we will keep in mind the various politics of gender, class, and race associated with the Woman of Greek Letters, as a generic category and in individual examples, situated within a variety of literary contexts, social networks, and institutional locations. But through these differences we can also see a recurring passion for ancient Greek that characterized how women thought and felt in the nineteenth century and beyond; we can see how they used ancient Greek to prove themselves: as Cooper wrote, “women who can think as well as feel, and who feel nonetheless because they think.” In this way, Ladies’ Greek became a lively and diverse culture with its own modes of cognition and recognition, producing its own dynamics of affect and desire, and turning classical reception into an active production for the transmission and transformation of classics. The question was no longer whether women ought to learn the Greek alphabet, but how.

Translating Greek Tragedy Greek tragedy was especially suited to the gendered performances of Ladies’ Greek, as a genre that could be used to perform “female” pathos, “feminine” sympathy, and “feminist” polemics within a Victorian culture of sentiment and ongoing debates about “The Woman Question.” The proliferation of nineteenth-century editions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, along with critical commentaries and literary translations, made Greek tragedy increasingly accessible for women to read, in Greek and in English, and they often invoked Greek tragic heroines for sympathetic identification and moral reflection. They moralized about the loyalty of Antigone, the mourning of Electra, the self-sacrifice of Alcestis, the filial piety of Iphigeneia, the maternal grief of Hecuba, the revenge of Clytemnestra, the rage of Medea, and the suffering of other female characters in Greek tragedy as powerful—if ambiguous—models for Victorian womanhood. The dramatic monologues and elegiac lamentations of these tragic women could be used to articulate the plights of nineteenthcentury women and their political causes; when John Stuart Mill was preparing to write The Subjection of Women, Florence Nightingale sent him a privately printed edition of Cassandra (1852) as her “angry outcry against the forced idleness of Victorian woman.”37 And a few years later, George Eliot incorporated her intensive readings of Aristotle and Greek tragedy into various essays (including “Antigone and its Moral” in 1856) and into her novels, where we find 26

Introduction

variations on the themes, plots, characters and the very idea of Greek tragedy, as many critics have observed.38 On the other side of the Atlantic Greek tragedy was also avidly read by American women. Margaret Fuller named tragic heroines like Cassandra, Antigone, Hecuba, and Iphigenia alongside other “shining names of famous women” in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844). Her transfiguration of many women, both literary and historical, into a single figure for “Woman” demonstrates how “Fuller relies on the rhetoric of prosopography to establish the claims of woman,” as Alison Booth points out in How to Make it as a Woman. One way to make it as a woman in the nineteenth century was to identify with Greek tragic heroines, and indeed, the Greek tragic mask (or prosopon) is the defining term for Booth’s study of female multibiographies: she notes that “prosopography— literally the writing of masks—is sometimes used as another term for collective biography or “multibiography.”39 Through prosopopoeia, the rhetorical figure of personification, female prosopographies gave faces and names to personae that embodied the abstract ideals of Victorian womanhood. Thus Woman in the Nineteenth Century included an appendix (“Appendix G: Euripides. Sophocles.”) on Greek tragedy, with some of Fuller’s own notes and translations attributed to a fictional “Miranda”: As many allusions are made in the foregoing pages to characters of women drawn by the Greek dramatists, which may not be familiar to the majority of readers, I have borrowed from the papers of Miranda, some notes upon them. I trust the girlish tone of apostrophizing rapture may be excused. Miranda was very young at the time of writing, compared with her present mental age.40 Quoting “Miranda” as a younger version of herself enraptured by reading Greek tragedy, the mature Fuller addresses Greek tragic heroines in the name of all women: Iphigenia! Antigone! You were worthy to live! We are fallen on evil times, my sisters! Our feelings have been checked; our thoughts questioned; our forms dwarfed and defaced by a bad nurture. Yet hearts, like yours, are in our breasts, living, if unawakened; and our minds are capable of the same resolves. (136) Moving from the past tense (“you were worthy to live”) into the present, “Miranda” addresses these self-sacrificing heroines in order to define the Women and the Greek Alphabet 27

transhistorical character of woman; her apostrophe to “you” as “my sisters” defines the common nature of all women, even if “we are fallen on evil times” and “defaced by a bad nurture.” Through sympathetic response to the heroic suffering of Iphigenia and Antigone, women can discover that “hearts, like yours, are in our breasts, living.” Paradoxically, these literary characters translated out of a dead language seem more alive than the women who must learn to live and think by their example. The rhetoric of exemplarity had the effect of turning Fuller herself into an emblematic female character, both through the identification of “Miranda” with the characters of Greek tragedy and through the very process of translating these texts. After several excerpts from Iphegenia at Aulis, translated from Euripides by Fuller, the appendix reflects further on how to read tragedy not only for sympathy with the character, but in sympathy with the translator: Can I appreciate this work in a translation? I think so, impossible as it may seem to one who can enjoy the thousand melodies, and words in exactly the right place and cadence of the original. They say you can see the Apollo Belvidere in a plaster cast, and I cannot doubt it, so great the benefit conferred on my mind, by a transcript thus imperfect. And so with these translations from the Greek. I can divine the original through this veil. . . . Beside, every translator who feels his subject is inspired, and the divine Aura informs even his stammering lips. (144) According to Fuller, we can “appreciate” the original Greek text in translation because “every translator who feels his subject is inspired.” The letter is infused with spirit through the inspiration of the translator: even if the translation cannot retain “words in exactly the right place,” even it is an imperfect “transcript,” nevertheless we can get an impression (the image of the original, as seen in a plaster cast or through a veil). But this is only possible if the translator really “feels his subject,” or (in the case of Fuller) feels “her” subject. Turning “Miranda” into an ideal example of “every translator,” Fuller invited a sympathetic reading of her own literary character through translating Greek tragedy. Fuller’s vision of Greek tragic heroines was a self-conscious reflection of, and on, the popular reception of Greek tragedy in Anglo-American literary culture. In addition to circulating in new scholarly editions and popular translations, classical drama was increasingly performed on the nineteenth-century stage, where actresses appeared as the embodiment of ideal womanhood, in Grecian garb and classical poses that imitated Greek statuary, in a series of individual “attitudes” and tableaux of carefully composed group formations, like 28

Introduction

statues. Helen Faucit’s 1845 performance of Antigone, for example, inspired De Quincey to write: “What perfection of Athenian sculpture! The noble figure, the lovely arms, the fluent drapery! What an unveiling of the ideal statuesque!” Conflating the pose of the woman with the moral character of Antigone, he added; “Perfect she is in form; perfect in attitude.”41 This common comparison between Greek tragedy and the art of sculpture, embodied by women in particular, produced an idealized “feminine” aesthetic that women increasingly sought to mobilize for their own purposes, as they translated Greek tragedy from the page to the stage and also from the stage back to the page. Given the wide-spread interest in revival of Greek tragedy by women, it is no surprise that the first Ph.D. awarded to a woman in America was for Helen Magill’s thesis, “The Greek Drama.” Dated 1877 at Boston University, the document remains unnoticed in the annals of women’s higher education. It is a mere 17 pages copied out by hand; at a time when women were given “honorary” degrees for postgraduate work, it may have passed for more of a doctoral dissertation than it really was. Nevertheless I publish the first page here for the first time, out of historical as well as literary interest (Figure 0.6). While Magill’s thesis did not offer any original arguments, it effectively cited German critics (like Müller and Schlegel), English dramatists (like Shakespeare and Dryden) in order to condense nineteenth-century ideas about Greek drama, by which she meant tragedy in particular. Her opening paragraph emphasized the effect of Greek tragedy “upon the mind,” turning the statuesque “pose” cultivated by women performing Greek tragedy into an Arnoldian emphasis on “repose”: The drama of the Greeks has often been compared with their statuary, and the effect which it produces upon the mind inevitably suggests this comparison. The elements of the statuesque quality are to be found in its simplicity, in a certain repose and dignity, a self-contained air throughout the whole, and in the absence of background, to speak figuratively. In elaborating the effect of Greek tragedy “upon the mind,” Magill was not only describing its effect on her own mind; she was also echoing a broader critical tendency to read Greek tragedy as an idea that could be played out in the imagination, “self-contained” and with “absence of background.” In the following pages, Magill went on to argue that “the peculiarity of the ancient drama is to be found in its ideal character,” and “this may be compared with the effect which is produced in statuary by absence of color” (2). Concurring with Schlegel, Magill discovered the “ideality” of Greek tragedy through Sophocles in particular: after comparing the three tragedians, she concluded Women and the Greek Alphabet 29

0.6 Helen Magill, “The Greek Drama,” 1877 Thesis, Boston University. Helen Magill White Papers #4107. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

that “Sophocles has the most ennobling influence on the mind” (17). In contrast to Fuller’s impassioned apostrophe to Greek tragic heroines, Magill’s thesis was more concerned with the contemplation of action as embodied in the chorus. According to Magill, while lyrical dialogue “excites sympathy with the hero or heroine through its own expressions of sympathy,” the choral odes allow for “a transition from scene to scene, bringing the mind back from the excitement of the temporary interest to a calm consideration of the spirit and meaning of the whole, thus acting as interpreter between poet and audience” (10). Although Magill’s thesis is a marginal document in the history of classical scholarship (another example of “some Greek upon the margin”), it highlights some central points to keep in mind in our reading of nineteenth-century women’s reading of Greek tragedy. Their idea (and idealization) of this genre in particular worked in tandem with an idealization of woman, embodied in the characters of Greek tragedy as well as in the characters of women who translated and performed Greek tragedy. In addition to their tendency to identify themselves with tragic heroines, equally important was their identification with the chorus as a collective body that could reflect on the performance of 30

Introduction

Greek tragedy, thus incorporating a self-consciously performative element into women’s translations of Greek tragedy. As a genre that combined dramatic monologues and dialogues with choral odes, tragedy also gave them the opportunity to write in different literary forms. Through the heightened pathos of Greek tragedy, they could dramatize their passion for ancient Greek, which they enacted in the performance of translation, not only on the page but also on the stage and in other forms of re-enactment. The following chapters focus on five Greek tragedies, the Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, the Electra of Sophocles, and the Hippolytus and Bacchae of Euripides. I fold my own reading of these tragedies into my analysis of various translational practices, in order to reflect further on the transformation of content into form through translation: in this double reading, we can refer “what” is being translated back into “how.” More often than not, as I have already begun to suggest, the appeal of translating ancient Greek was an encounter with something untranslatable, creating an experience of linguistic estrangement that left Greek letters unspoken and unknown. To ponder this paradox, Chapter One considers “On Not Knowing Greek” by Virginia Woolf as part of the longer Victorian legacy of Ladies’ Greek. I place Woolf ’s 1925 essay within the context of her earlier Greek studies, when she pursued intensive readings of Greek tragedy, first with Janet Case as her tutor and then in her own notebooks. Looking at Woolf ’s Agamemnon notebook, I consider how the strange utterance of Cassandra (otototoi) appears in Greek letters on the page and also how it was made to appear in two dramatic productions staged in ancient Greek at Cambridge University (in 1900 and in 1921). In the process of transcribing and translating Cassandra’s utterance, Woolf confronts the mad literality of dead Greek letters: a scene of reading that is repeated again and again in translations of Greek tragedy by other women, both before and after Woolf. Demonstrating how women’s claim to classical literacy often revolved around the problem of translating “literally,” Chapter Two moves from Woolf to a longer historical chain of women who also translated Aeschylus. I consider different versions of Prometheus Bound, analyzing how various practices of “literal” translation seemed to bind women to the Greek text: rather than claiming authorial mastery by translating Greek, they performed their subjection to a language that could never be completely mastered. I argue that the translator’s bondage is dramatized not only through the suffering of the immobilized Prometheus (the god who taught mankind how to write Greek letters), but also through the cries of the painfully mobile Io (the woman who has Greek letters inscribed on her body). The chapter begins with a reading of E.B.B, as the first woman to translate Prometheus Bound into English (in 1833 and again in Women and the Greek Alphabet 31

1850) and as an important prototype for other “lady-translators” in England and America. E.B.B.’s incorporation of Greek letters into the body of her writing was turned into an increasingly public performance in print, in translations of Prometheus Bound by Augusta Webster (in 1866) and Anna Swanwick (in 1873) and Janet Case (in 1903). American women also turned to translating this tragedy with various degrees of constraint and freedom, in an imitation of Io in the notebooks of Annie Fields (ca. 1880), a “free” version of Prometheus Bound by Edith Hamilton (first published in 1927, reprinted in 1937, and performed in Athens in 1957), and a spectacular production mounted at Delphi by Eva Palmer Sikelianos (in 1927). By tracing the travels of Io from England to America and back to Greece, we see how these women performed their identification with Greek letters through different modes of translation. The spectacle of feminized classical literacy is further explored in Chapter Three, where I consider two historic productions of the Electra of Sophocles. Fully staged by women at Girton College and at Smith College, in 1883 and 1889 respectively, these were the first collegiate performances of tragedy in ancient Greek by women in Victorian England and America. I read their performance of ancient Greek in relation to nineteenth-century debates about the higher education of women, emphasizing the collegiate community and transatlantic collegiate communication that made it desirable for women to memorize and recite a dead language as if it were alive. Rather than translating Greek into English, they drew on a tradition of classical posing, to “transpose” the text into the visual and auditory languages associated with Delsartean performance practices: gesture, costume, set design, synchronized movement, metrical recitation, song. Their dramatic presentation depended on these alternative modes of translation as well as the subsequent re-presentation of the spectacle in various written accounts: personal letters, student magazines, alumni publications, newspaper reports, local reviews, photographic essays, albums, books. From materials in the college archives I reconstruct how the cast of Electra was trained for a highly stylized performance, embodying the Sophoclean text in and for a collective student body that sought to commemorate itself through the ritual of mourning. The lamentation of Electra and the chorus made the female actors into figures for melancholy identification, bearing the empty urn of a dead language, yet filling it with new meaning. After considering translations of Aeschylus and Sophocles in my first three chapters, Chapters Four and Five show how women contributed to a major shift in the reception of Euripides. While early nineteenth-century scholars were quick to dismiss the third of the great Greek tragedians as melodramatic, decadent, and effeminate, there was growing interest toward the end of the century 32

Introduction

in the female tragic heroines of Euripidean tragedy and in its “feminine” lyricism. The highly eroticized, lyricized language of Hippolytus appealed to British aesthetes such as John Addington Symonds, who entered into correspondence with the young Agnes Mary Francis Robinson and encouraged her to translate this tragedy. Chapter Four begins with a reading of their letters (and Greek letters in their letters) and goes on to analyze in further detail Robinson’s translation of Euripides in The Crowned Hippolytus (1881). Like E.B.B., she began her literary career by translating Greek; creating a new type of female aestheticism and a highly aesheticized poetic style, the metrical virtuosity of her translation made it possible to read Ladies’ Greek “with” the accents. I further argue that the early work of Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) owes much to this late Victorian vision of Euripidean tragedy; in translating “Choruses from the Hippolytus of Euripides” (1919) and in writing “a play after Euripides” entitled Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), the modernist cadences of H.D.’s poetry can be aligned with Ladies’ Greek, turning Victorian cadences into the “feet feet feet feet feet” of modernist verse. In Chapter Five, I ask why and how women became especially interested in The Bacchae of Euripides to reimagine the bacchante, or maenad, as ecstatic female worshipper of Dionysus. Even more than Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Walter Pater’s essays inspired versions of Dionysian Hellenism by female aesthetes, as they turned to the maenad to enact the mobility of “the new woman” at the turn of the century and to mobilize Ladies’ Greek in new directions, toward an experience of kinesthesia. Their imaginative identification with maenads took different forms in prose and poetry, in dance and drama, to incorporate an idea of rhythm into a moving body, both individual and collective. I consider Jane Harrison as a “modern maenad” whose ideas about Dionysiac ritual developed during her years at Newnham College, in the performative aesthetics of her scholarship and her pedagogy. On the other side of the Atlantic, I consider the pedagogical setting of Bryn Mawr College, where students were initiated into a “cult of Greek” under the leadership of M. Carey Thomas. I conclude with a closer look at a student production of The Bacchae for the fiftieth anniversary of Bryn Mawr. Directed by Eva Palmer Sikelianos, herself an alumna of the college, the choreography of this performance can be read as a transformation of ancient Greek into dancing letters. Ladies’ Greek is structured as a series of dramatic episodes; some of the dramatis personae are familiar names, some less so. My examples have been chosen to emphasize multiple approaches to translating Greek tragedy, and to develop an approach to classical reception that does not depend on a chronological or “comprehensive” survey of Greek tragedy in Victorian England and Women and the Greek Alphabet 33

America. Rather than assuming the continuity or coherence of a classical tradition, I argue that classical reception is better understood through converging and diverging enactments, demonstrating different possibilities for the performance of Ladies’ Greek, at different moments and in different places on both sides of the Atlantic. I emphasize a transatlantic perspective, not only to extend current research on the role played by Anglo-American women in the nineteenth-century circulation of classics, but as a logical extension of my argument about translation, as a dynamic movement between languages, across texts, and around various contexts. The mobilization of Greek letters created new ways to read and write Greek tragedy, and new networks of literary exchange among Women of Letters. In the following pages, we can begin to see how they transformed and transported Greek tragedy in a moving performance of translation, filled with πάθος and ἔρως.

34

Introduction

Chapter One

The Spell of Greek Virginia Woolf’s Agamemnon Notebook Virginia Woolf read Greek with a passion, beginning in 1897 with a series of private tutors and continuing on her own for many years. In the early journals collected in A Passionate Apprentice, Woolf fondly described her Greek lessons with Miss Janet Case, whose favorite writers were the Greek tragedians. She taught Woolf that “Aeschylus was strenuous, grand, impassioned,”1 and their tutorials included some strenuous readings in Aeschylean tragedy, with Woolf reporting in 1903: “a great flea jumped on to my Aeschylus as I read with Case the other day—and now bites large holes in me.”2 Bitten by the bug, Woolf also jumped into Aeschylus, making her way through the Greek text in leaps and bounds, despite large holes in her comprehension. “I have taken a plunge into tough Greek, and that has so much attraction for me—Heaven knows why— that I don’t want to do anything else,” she wrote (Letters I, 177). During this early phase of her Greek studies, she recorded her readings in Greek drama in various reading notebooks, where she noted especially of Aeschylus that “in the obscurity of the language lies its dramatic merit.”3 Woolf returned to Aeschylus two decades later, when she was preparing to write her essay “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925). “I am beginning Greek again . . . but which Greek play?” she asked herself in a diary entry of 1922.4 Having chosen the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, she wrote, “I think that clears the matter up—though how to read Aeschylus, I don’t quite know: quickly is my desire, but that, I see, is an illusion.”5 She resolved to “read Greek now steadily” as a daily discipline, since “at forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain” (Diary II, 205–206). In the course of several months, she compiled her own “crib” for translating the Greek text of the Agamemnon, with English on one side of each page and Greek on the other).6 It is an extraordinary object to behold, with its hand-worn cover and yellowed pages covered in Woolf ’s distinctive handwriting, part manuscript and part collage (Figure 1.1). To make this notebook, Woolf cut up an older Greek edition of the play (published in 1831 by Charles James Blomfield) and pasted the printed text into the right side 35

1.1 Virginia Woolf, “Agamemnon” Notebook (ca. 1922) The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. With permission from The Society of Authors on behalf of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.

of each page. On the left side she transcribed by hand, in variously black and blue ink from her fountain pen, a prose translation by Professor Arthur Verrall (published in 1904, an annotated edition with Greek and English on facing pages). Woolf wrote at the time, “I am making a complete edition, text, translation & notes of my own—mostly copied from Verrall; but carefully gone into by me” (Diary II, 215). Unpublished and unauthorized, her private “edition” was less a translation than a transcription, to which Woolf added a few variations with occasional marks and remarks in the margins, commenting on passages of interest or defining Greek works that she had underlined and looked up in the Greek-English dictionary. After several months of trying “to make out what Aeschylus wrote” (Diary 213) and “master the Agamemnon” (Diary 25), Woolf was pleased to proclaim, “I now know how to read Greek quick (with a crib in one hand) & with pleasure” (Diary 73). But the purpose of this “quick” reading was not to revive ancient Greek in living English, but rather to quicken the strange pleasure of reading a dead 36

Chapter One

language. Woolf describes this experience of reading Aeschylus in a remarkable passage from her essay “On Not Knowing Greek.” Enumerating the 1663 lines of the Agamemnon, she observes that Aeschylus makes this drama “tremendous by stretching every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors,” so that “it is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words.”7 Answering her own question—how to read Aeschylus—she seems to have turned the flea literally jumping onto a page of Aeschylus into a figure of thought: a way to trace the movement of her own mind around the words on the page. While the words of Aeschylus are often “blown astray,” according to Woolf, their meaning might be discerned in a “rapid flight”: For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we cannot know exactly what it means. (31–32) Going on to quote a line from the Agamemnon in Greek, Woolf concludes that “the meaning is just on the far side of language.” To get that far, to the other side of language, we too must leap into a space between English and Greek. Woolf ’s Agamemnon notebook sets the stage for this way of reading the play. Much more than a “crib,” the notebook is a theatrical spectacle in its own right; a theatre where Woolf can perform the act of translating—transposing, transcribing, transliterating, transforming—one language into another. This is not a linear movement from English to Greek, but the creation of an interlingual space that allows us to read in multiple directions. The page of Woolf ’s notebook reproduced in Figure 1.1 is the beginning of the Cassandra scene, a primal scene of linguistic estrangement enacted in the first syllables uttered, or rather stuttered, by Cassandra: ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ· ὤπολλον, ὤπολλον (1072–1073). At this point in the play, it is not clear yet whether Cassandra is speaking in Greek, or in another tongue, or perhaps in tongues. In its radical unintelligibility, her utterance is both barbaric (otototoi, a series of stuttering syllables that sounds foreign to the ear) and prophetic (O Apollo O Apollo, a punning invocation to the name of the god who is her destroyer). The momentary alienation of words from meaning is an effect that Woolf admired in Aeschylean tragedy. For her essay “On Not Knowing Greek,” she The Spell of Greek 37

quoted Cassandra’s words as they appeared in her Agamemnon notebook, and she called this “the naked cry” of Cassandra: Every sentence had to explode on striking the ear, however slowly and beautifully the words might then descend, and however enigmatic might their final purport be. No splendour or richness of metaphor could have saved the Agamemnon if either images or allusions of the subtlest or most decorative had got between us and the naked cry ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ· ὤπολλον, ὤπολλον. (32–33) What struck Woolf in this moment was the literality of Greek letters, simultaneously before and beyond the figurative language that Aeschylus sends floating forth in metaphors. But if Cassandra’s naked cry might have been heard “to explode on striking the ear” in ancient Greek, here, in Woolf ’s essay, it can only be spelled out in letters that seem to explode on striking the eye: an enigmatic quotation left “naked” in the middle of the page, untranslated and untransliterated, to create a space for reading between languages. In the essay, as in the notebook, it is a dramatic encounter with Greek letters, staged by Woolf for performance in the mind of the reader. As a performance of and for reading, Woolf ’s Agamemnon reflects back on a long history of translating Greek tragedy for the page and not for the stage: a textual tradition exemplified in translations of Aeschylus by some of Woolf ’s literary precursors in Victorian England. For example, Robert Browning’s Agamemnon was never intended as a script to be performed for an audience in the theatre; published in 1877, his “transcript” was a more idiosyncratic writerly production, in which he played the role of a famous reader in his encounter with a famous text. Translating “in as Greek a fashion as our English will bear,” Browning tried to follow the twists and turns of the original text as literally as possible, and in the case of Cassandra simply transliterated her lament: “Otototoi, Gods, Earth, Apollon, Apollon!”8 Indeed Browning translated the Agamemnon so literally that one reader complained, “at almost every page I had to turn to the Greek to see what the English meant.”9 The scene of reading famously (or infamously) enacted in Browning’s “transcript” left him hovering between English and Greek, not unlike Woolf ’s transcription of the Agamemnon: at every page of her notebook, we have to turn from Greek to English and from English to Greek, to see what might have been meant. Of course, the translation of Greek tragedy within a textual tradition does not preclude or exclude familiarity with other kinds of performance. Alongside scholarly debates about literal and translingual translation in the 38

Chapter One

nineteenth century, there was a dramatic revival of these texts in the visual arts and in the theater, in amateur theatricals and on the popular stage, in low burlesque and in high opera, and within various academic settings, especially toward the end of the century. Browning attended the 1880 Agamemnon performed in Greek at Oxford, and by the early twentieth century such student productions were an established tradition, familiar to Woolf as well. She was especially interested in The Cambridge Greek Play, and her Agamemnon notebook can be read in relation to two productions in particular. The first was a performance of the Agamemnon in 1900, when Woolf ’s brother Thoby was a student at Cambridge and Woolf was beginning to learn Greek. The second was the Oresteia produced at Cambridge by J. T. Sheppard in 1921, around the time when Woolf was returning to her Greek studies in her Agamemnon notebook, and preparing to write “On Not Knowing Greek.” In these productions, the recitation of ancient Greek must have seemed strange indeed: what did it mean to imagine the sound of Greek, to hear and see a dead language spoken on the stage? Although Woolf wrote in her essay that “we cannot hear it, now dissonant, tossing sound from line to line across a page,” in her notebook we can see it, tossing letters from line to line across a page to imagine another way of understanding Greek. Here she transposed the strange experience of seeing a play performed in Greek, simultaneously out of and back into the strange experience of reading Greek. But first let us consider how Woolf read Aeschylus, in (and on) different stages. Woolf learned Greek not for scholarly purposes but as an amateur, for the love of it. Like so many girls in the nineteenth century, she began informally at home with her brother. “It was through him that I first heard about the Greeks,” Woolf recalled in “A Sketch of the Past,”10 and during the years when Thoby was a student at Cambridge she asked him to “help me with a Greek play or two” (Letters I, 42). Then in 1897, she wrote a letter to him, announcing that “I am beginning Greek at King’s College,” and boasting that “we have got as far as the first verb in our Greek, and by the Christmas holidays you will have to take me in hand” (Letters I, 10). Woolf ’s teacher in the Ladies’ Department of King’s College was Professor George Warr, who had a special interest in Aeschylean drama. He had directed The Story of Orestes in 1886 and was working on a translation of The Oresteia of Aeschylus, Translated and Explained for publication in 1900. Surveying the rise of Greek tragedy in his introduction, he emphasized that the poetry of Aeschylus came to life in “a large, imaginative presentation,” and that Aeschylus was “a composer, trainer, actor” who “exerted his skill, acquired by lifelong professional training, in the invention of orchestic figures and gestures.”11 As a director, Warr also exerted his skill in a vivid The Spell of Greek

39

recreation of Aeschylean drama, not only by translating Greek words into English but by imagining the translation of words into gestures as well. While learning to love Aeschylus from “my beloved Warr” (Letters I, 20), Woolf also studied Latin and Greek with the sister of Walter Pater, Miss Clara Pater, who was “perfectly delightful” (Letters I, 26). Woolf took special delight in Greek, expressed repeatedly in her correspondence from the turn of the century. She fell in love with the language, taking pleasure in spelling out ordinary English words in Greek letters, as she wrote in a letter, “ΤΡΟΥΣΕΡΣ: τρουσερς: trousers: trousers now, does the obtuse beast understand?” (Letters I, 24). Then in 1902, to move into more serious and sustained reading of Greek texts, Woolf began private tutorials with Janet Case that continued off and on for seven years. Case made a strong impression on the young Woolf, whose diary of 1903 includes a sketch dedicated a sketch to “Miss Case”: “an excellent teacher” and “a valiant strong-minded woman” who lived up to Woolf ’s high expectations for Greek (Apprentice 183). “She seemed to me exactly what I had expected— tall, classical looking, masterfull [sic]” and also “more professional than Miss Pater” (Apprentice 182). The “masterful” Miss Case expected Woolf to master Greek, as well. Seeing that “my foundations were rotten, [she] procured a Grammar, & bade me start with the very first exercise” and “never failed to point out, with perfect good humour that my exercises were detestable.” Often she interrupted delight with “the tedium of Greek grammar” as Woolf recalled: I read a very lovely description of maidenhood in Euripides . . . & at the end I paused with some literary delight in its beauty. Not so Miss Case. “The use of the instrumental genitive in the 3rd line is extremely rare” her comment upon Love! But that is not a fair example; & at any rate I think it really praiseworthy; aesthetic pleasure is so much easier to attain than knowledge of his uses of the genitive—I think it is true that she read with a less pure literary interest in the text than I did. (Apprentice 183) But even if she read “with a less pure literary interest in the text” (it seemed Miss Case never missed a case, grammatically speaking), she left room for Woolf to read Greek with a more pure literary interest, for aesthetic pleasure. Woolf took note that “she was not by any means blind to the beauties of Aeschylus” and sometimes “she would spend a whole lesson in defining the relation of Aeschylus towards Fate” (Apprentice 83). Janet Case’s passion for Aeschylean drama in particular began with her own student days, at Girton College in Cambridge. She played the role of Athena for 40

Chapter One

the Cambridge Greek Play in 1885, the only woman in an all-male production of The Eumenides. Widely praised for her classical posture and excellent elocution, she was remembered for the rest of her life in this memorable role.12 Woolf ’s obituary for Case in 1937 described her as “a noble Athena, breaking down the tradition that only men acted in the Greek play,” demonstrating how Greek plays might be actively read, re-read and re-enacted by women to create social activism: “her Greek was connected with the politics of her day,” including women’s suffrage and other feminist causes.13 Case had even published an early “feminist” reading of Aeschylus. Combining scholarly commentary with passionate politics in “Women in the Plays of Aeschylus” (1914), Case insisted that “Aeschylus gives his women brains as well as hearts,” and she was especially eloquent in defense of Clytemnestra, who “strips naked the unjust bias of men’s condemnation.”14 According to Case, Clytemnestra embodies “the qualities [Aeschylus] prized most in women, courage, loyalty, love; only in her . . . they have been poisoned at the source and turned to evil things by the intolerable pain of wrong and suffering”; nevertheless, Clytemnestra commands our respect through “sheer intellectual force” and “torrential eloquence.”15 The intellectual force and eloquence of Case commanded similar respect from Woolf, who recalls “she was a person of ardent theories & she could expound them fluently” (Apprentice 182). These theories made a lasting impression Woolf as her passionate apprentice. Years later, in “On Not Knowing Greek,” Woolf defended Clytemnestra much as Case had done: “Clytemnestra is no unmitigated villainess. ‘δεῖνον τὸ τίκτειν ἐστίν’ she says—‘there is a strange power in motherhood.’ It is no murderess, violent and unredeemed, whom Orestes kills within the house” (28). And when she published her essay on Greek in The Common Reader, Woolf was eager for approval from her former Greek tutor: “I am very glad you like the Common Reader. I was rather nervous lest you should curse my impertinence for writing about Greek, when you are quite aware of my complete ignorance” (Letters III, 191). Yet Case did not insist on complete knowledge of Greek, as Woolf recalls in her eulogy: “If the pupil were destined to remain an amateur, Janet Case accepted the fact,” and then “the grammar was shut and the play opened. 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.”16 Rather than lamenting the difficulty of educating women to write and pronounce Greek properly, Woolf turned “Lady’s Greek, without the accents” into a revelation of Greek as a language of and for desire, accentuating the passion of her own performance of Ladies’ Greek beyond a scholarly reading. For Woolf the desirability of Greek The Spell of Greek 41

had little to do with classical scholarship, as she wrote emphatically: “I detest pale scholars with their questioning about life, and the message of the classics, and the bearing of Greek thought upon modern problems” (Letters I, 386). Despite her desire to remain an amateur, Woolf was well-acquainted with classicists at Cambridge, and she cultivated friendships with Walter Headlam (of King’s College) and Arthur Verrall (of Trinity College), rival scholars of Aeschylus. She had a brief flirtation with Headlam at the time when he was busy editing and translating Aeschylean tragedy, and he may have intended to dedicate his translation to her, before his sudden death.17 “Last time I saw him he complained as usual, but thought that he was becoming known, and he had almost finished some edition of Aeschylus,” wrote Woolf in 1908, and in 1910 she saw the posthumous publication of his Agamemnon of Aeschylus with Verse Translation, Introduction and Notes (Letters I, 336). But when Woolf returned to reading Aeschylus a decade later, the translation she chose to transcribe for her Agamemnon notebook was not by Headlam, but by Professor Verrall. Known as “the Great Verrall,” he was praised in the preface to his Collected Literary Essays, Ancient and Modern for a poetic sense of Aeschylean language: To judge from his work on Aeschylus, Verrall would seem to have come near to grasping its utmost possibilities. By a fearless recognition of the boldness and pregnancy of Aeschylean phraseology, and of the freedom of Aeschylean syntax, he enlarged our whole conception of the whole language. He, so to speak, extended its reach.18 In her notebook Woolf drew on Verrall’s authority to enlarge her conception of Greek and extend its reach into English as well, perhaps finding a way to reconceive her own prose through the “pregnancy of Aeschylean phraseology” and the “freedom of Aeschylean syntax” as her model. Choosing Verrall over Headlam to transcribe as the crib for her Agamemnon notebook, Woolf seems to have taken sides in a notorious debate between the two scholars about editing Aeschylus, in which Headlam claimed philological expertise and Verrall literary sensibility. The rhetorical stakes in this scholarly battle were high, as Simon Goldhill has argued: “What glossing does to texts, what knowledge is brought to bear, released or repressed, is inevitably part of an institutional and intellectual politics of reading.”19 But Woolf played out these politics of reading on a different stage, in the pages of her Agamemnon notebook; in contrast to Headlam and Verrall and their public debates about editing Aeschylus, she created her Agamemnon notebook as a private performance of reading, for her eyes only. More interested in understanding 42

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poetry than philology, she used her personal “edition” of the play to transpose their self-authorizing glosses into the unauthorized glossolalia of Ladies’ Greek. In cultivating the literary dimension of classical scholarship, Woolf found a kindred spirit in Jane Ellen Harrison at Newnham College. Although Harrison taught classics at Cambridge University alongside scholars like Headlam and Verrall, her scholarly ambitions were less philological and more freewheeling in reading Greek for other imaginative purposes. Woolf records how she was first introduced to Harrison “and all the other learned Ladies” at Newnham (Letters I, 145), and in the course of their friendship, Woolf came to admire the interplay of scholarly and aesthetic prose in Harrison’s writing about archaic Greek religion, ritual, and myth. She persuaded Hogarth Press to publish Harrison’s Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (1925), and the spectral presence of “the famous scholar, could it be J———H———herself?” famously haunts the lecture presented by Woolf at Newnham, later published in A Room of One’s Own.20 Various critics have read Woolf in relation to Harrison, locating both on “the stage of scholarship” as Sandra Shattuck suggests: “It is as if Woolf were staging Harrison’s work in a fictional rewrite of Harrison’s scholarship, providing a theatre where creative scholarship and creative writing combine.”21 To Woolf, Harrison seemed the very embodiment of desire for Greek. “To fall in love with a language is an enchanting experience,” Harrison proclaimed in Aspects, Aorists, and the Classical Tripos. “What was the spell cast by Greek?” she wondered: It was not the spell of Homer or Aeschylus or Plato; I could not read them. No—if I may be forgiven a reminiscence important for my point—I fell in love suddenly, hopelessly with the Greek particles μέν and δέ and γοῦν and δ’οὖν. I remember the hours and the place as though it were yesterday 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, more delicate in its balance of clauses, in its setting out of the relations of things, more charged with the magic of well—Intellectual Beauty.22 Echoing Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ in her own intellectual, beautiful prose, Harrison describes her first encounter with Greek as a highly aestheticized and eroticized experience. Even before reading Aeschylus (or Homer or Plato), Harrison claims she had already fallen in love with the Greek alphabet. Spelling out in Greek the particles men and de and goun and d’oun, The Spell of Greek 43

she was enchanted by the “spell” of Greek, experiencing the language as a physical sensation with a “hot-cold shiver of delight” So also Woolf was enchanted by Greek, as she recalled later in life: “How powerful the spell is still—Greek. Thank heaven I learnt it young—an emotion different from any other.”23 For Woolf the spell that Greek “still” held was also the spelling of “still—Greek,” a silent alphabet. No matter how long Woolf studied ancient Greek, she found its meaning just beyond reach, and just beyond speech, as she jotted in one of her reading notebooks: “The difficulty of reading Greek is not the words, but getting the fling of the sentence entire—as it leaves the mouth. I am always being knotted up.”24 This sensation of “being knotted up” nevertheless enabled Woolf to make sense of Greek in a different way, not to reclaim a living language that could be pronounced but to proclaim the experience of reading Greek as a dead language, no longer spoken. And so, as the culmination of two decades of Greek studies, Woolf wrote her very famous and very beautiful essay, “On Not knowing Greek.” The title seems to disclaim knowledge of Greek; yet far from lamenting that we do not know how to read Greek, Woolf ’s essay turns out to be a meditation on how to read Greek as a language for not knowing. The first sentence of the essay seems to follow from its title: “For it is vain and foolish to talk of Knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded” (24). But unlike Victorian schoolboys who learned to recite ancient Greek, or Victorian philologists who debated its authentic pronunciation, Woolf understood philology more literally as a love of Greek logoi that would prefer to leave the language unpronounced, unspoken, and unknown. The first paragraph therefore goes on to elaborate how the very strangeness of Greek, its unknowability, also provokes a strange desire to know it: All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say? (24) Beginning with the disclaimer that we cannot “talk of Knowing Greek,” and ending with the question “who shall say?” this long sentence with its series of suspended clauses implies that the experience of reading Greek leaves one speechless, and in suspense. Such a state of suspension is precisely where Woolf wanted the reader (herself, ourselves) to be. Again and again the essay, like a 44

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refrain, reminds us of our inability to speak and hear words in Greek: “For they are Greek; we cannot tell how they sounded (29); “But again (the question comes back and back), Are we reading Greek as it was written when we say this?” (36); “We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek. We cannot hear it” (36). Quoting various words and phrases in Greek throughout the essay, Woolf demonstrated how “it is useless, then, to read Greek in translations” (37), for what would be lost in English is the untranslatability of the Greek, the encounter with its unspoken otherness, the hot-cold sensation of not knowing Greek. At a time when classicists made various claims to “knowing Greek,” Woolf turned to Greek to perform “not knowing” as a movement of thought more mobile, more emotive, or (as she described the powerful spell of Greek) “an emotion different from any other.” This mobility of thought was played out in Woolf ’s Agamemnon notebook, where we can see in the traces of her writing how Woolf might have been thinking through Greek to English and through English to Greek. And by focusing on the scene with Cassandra in particular, we can see how the stuttering of her first words—the letters ὀτοτοτοῖ, the graphic representation of a “barbaric” utterance—also hovers strangely between languages, turning Cassandra into a figure for the strange literality of language itself, which remains untranslatable. But even as the effect of this scene is to make Cassandra seem untranslatable, she simultaneously resists and provokes translation. In her notebook, Woolf imagined Cassandra in the interplay between theatrical and textual performances, somewhere between the page and the stage, between the scene of writing and the scene of reading, between English and Greek, thus creating a space for the possibility of translation as well as pointing to its impossibility.

Cassandra between the Stage and the Page The image of Cassandra in late Victorian scholarship explains, at least in part, Woolf ’s interest in reimagining this figure in her Agamemnon notebook. George Warr (her first Greek teacher) included a lengthy synopsis of the Cassandra scene in his 1900 Oresteia commentary, making special note of Cassandra’s “barbarian speech” in order to explain to the reader that ‘the word barbaros itself suggests a discordant jargon.”25 And in his 1904 edition of the Agamemnon, Verrall also wrote that Cassandra is “of immense importance in the tragedy . . . for its pathos,” emphasizing the dramatic impact of her speech: “In this astonishing scene Aeschylus seems to have touched the limit of what speech can do to excite pity and terror. The cries come forth to Apollo repeated The Spell of Greek 45

louder and more wildly as the inspiration grows upon her.”26 Even Headlam was in agreement with Verrrall on this (if only this) one point, noting in the introduction to his 1910 Agamemnon that “none can be more deeply impressive” than the figure of Cassandra, if successfully performed: “The very silence of Cassandra provokes a disposition to hear her speak. From the first moment that she opens her mouth, curiosity is superseded by sympathy and awe.”27 Equally important was the popular reception of Cassandra, who provoked sympathy and awe from British audiences as well. They had seen the character performed with increasing frequency in various productions around London toward the end of the nineteenth century: in The Tale of Troy directed by Warr in 1883, Eugenie Sellers played Cassandra in Homeric Greek (one of the “lovely women rolling out hexameters”),28 and Warr had chosen Dorothy Dene for a picturesque Cassandra in his “Story of Orestes” in 1886.29 Many a girl found a way to identify with the tragically enigmatic Cassandra, including A. Mary F. Robinson (the late nineteenth-century poetess who will return in Chapter Four). Robinson followed lectures in Classics at University College London in 1879, where she read Greek tragedy and declared the Agamemnon her favorite: she even imagined playing Cassandra in a private theatrical with Robert Browning (a family friend) in the role of Agamemnon.30 Although nothing came of this grand scheme, Robinson confessed in a personal letter, “At home they call me Cassandra because of my dark eyes & because of an evil habit that I have of singing or declaiming to myself so soon as I am alone. They declare that one meets me on the stairs wringing my hands & crying ὀτοτοτοῖ πόποι δᾶ!”31 Cassandra’s dramatic appeal is also recounted by Mary Vivian Hughes in A London Girl of the Eighties, the memoir of a working-class girl educated in North London to prepare for classical studies at Cambridge University. For a performance of “Hector and Andromache” by the sixth-form girls, Hughes chose the role of Cassandra, reassured by her teacher that “you can fill the hall with your voice if you like, and if you break down from nervousness or forgetting the words, why that in itself will add poignancy to your speech.” During the performance, Hughes recalls “I felt I actually was the prophetess doomed to speak the truth and yet never to be believed.”32 Eager to strike a classical pose, she identified with the cult of Classics at Cambridge and went to visit Girton College as a prospective student. Here she observed that “Cambridge was all asplash about a Greek play, to be performed by undergraduates, with only one woman actor, a Miss Case, to take the part of Athene in the Eumenides,” although as member of the audience in 1885 she found “that anything Greek could be so dull was my first surprise.”33 46

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Because it was performed in ancient Greek, the Cambridge Greek Play claimed more authenticity than “popular” productions, but this tradition was easily mocked for its academic pretensions. Cassandra makes a comic cameo appearance, for example, in E. F. Benson’s 1896 novel, The Babe, BA: Being the Uneventful History of a Young Gentleman at Cambridge. While the main character in Benson’s story prepares the role of Clytemnestra for a production of the Agamemnon, the director of the play “had very strong and original ideas on the subject of Cassandra, whom he had made his special care, and he had mapped out exceedingly carefully the gestures, tones, postures, and faces she was to make as the prophetic afflatus gradually gained possession over her.” It turns out Cassandra is “a tall young gentleman with a most lovely girlish face,” whose voice cracks during rehearsals of the Cassandra scene: She was to roll her eyes and stare at the centre of the fourth row of stalls at the word “Apollo”; she was to make a noise in her throat resembling gargling on the second “Alas”; she was to stagger on the third, and palpitate on the fourth. . . . She was mad; let the audience know it. Mad people were incoherent and throaty; what she said was incoherent, let her mode of saying it be as throaty as possible. She must continually gargle, gurgle, mule, puke, croak, creak, hoop, and hawk, and if then she didn’t bring the house down, well,—the fault was not hers. Cassandra, who at any rate had a good memory, and did blindly what she was told to do, had just been through her part with faultless accuracy, and was a little hoarse after it, and no wonder.34 In this parody, the naked cry of Cassandra is reduced to sputtering nonsense. The Agamemnon that was actually performed at Cambridge in 1900 was similarly satirized by Max Beerbohm in his damning review, “Aeschylus Made Ridiculous.” The stage set featured an elaborate archaeological reconstruction of a Minoan palace, suggesting to Beerbohm that “the palace of Agamemnon was strangely like the Alhambra Palace of Varieties, Leicester Square.”35 Although he considered it a “stupid, tawdry perversion of the Agamemnon,” this production proved to be an important moment in the history of the Cambridge Greek Play, and was by other accounts quite a powerful performance. J. F. Crace (later a classics tutor at Eton) played the role of Cassandra, praised in the Times “more than any other single performer, for in appearance, gesture, declamation, and conception the impersonation was most impressive.”36 A photo of Crace shows him veiled in exotic garments, arms uplifted and eyes averted, striking a darkly prophetic pose (Figure 1.2). The photo was printed The Spell of Greek 47

1.2 Two Cambridge Cassandras from 1900 (J. F. Crace) and 1921 (W. le B. Egerton). Cambridge Greek Play Archive. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

in the playbill for the Cambridge Greek Play, alongside a brief synopsis of “this magnificent episode,” explaining how the silence of Cassandra is broken when she “begins to moan and to call on Apollo.” As she is “grown more and more inspired with prophecy and foretells the murder” of Agamemnon, the chorus responds with disbelief and horror, and finally they “cry out on her, telling her to be silent.” And so, in the final words she returns to silence, blotted out like a drawing by “the wet sponge.”37 The obliteration of Cassandra is a graphic figure, suggesting how she differs from the other actors; she seems to embody visionary language briefly made visible in the theater, less a character defined by action than a character that enacts the strangeness of its own speaking. The playbill emphasized how this curious “character” should impress the audience: “She is not necessary to the story; she is not even a study of character; she is intensely interesting in her picturesque solitude, and her impressive personality.”38 In Crace’s performance, this written character was lifted off the page and presented on stage as the embodiment of Greek letters, made to speak to an English audience. The performance of the Aeschylean script in Greek was a way to animate (dead) Greek letters in the theater, where the audience could follow the action with a text specially published for the performance: The Agamemnon of 48

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Aeschylus, As Performed at Cambridge November 16–21, 1900, With the Verse Translation by Anna Swanwick. In this acting edition the Greek text is printed alongside a well-known English translation by Mrs. Swanwick (her Complete Tragedies of Aeschylus circulated in multiple editions in the late nineteenthcentury, as we shall see in Chapter Two). In the passage where Cassandra begins to speak, the Greek script appears on the right side of the page and English on the left side to help with the translation. But the naked cry of Cassandra is only partially translated, as ‘Ah me! Alas! Gods, Earth! Apollo, O Apollo!’ The untranslatable syllables otototoi have dropped out of the English text, leaving Cassandra’s utterance in limbo, heard but not understood. With this bilingual edition in hand, the audience must have entered into a peculiar scene of reading: instead of hearing English and reading Greek, they were hearing Greek while reading English, a reversal of the written and the spoken language that seemed to estrange both tongues. At least this is how Cassandra would have been seen by Woolf, who certainly knew of this production and may have been in the audience.39 She was familiar with the tradition of the Cambridge Greek Play, for in the first of these plays performed in 1882, the mad Ajax had been played by her own cousin, J. K. Stephen.40 This was the same J. K. Stephen who later went mad himself, but not before publishing an eloquent defense of compulsory Greek studies at Cambridge. His 1891 pamphlet, entitled “The Living Languages,” argued that “knowing” and “having known” Greek are a necessary part of any gentleman’s education, and Woolf ’s subsequent essay “On Not Knowing Greek” can be read as a response to his claim, since she lacked the formal education in Greek that he considered compulsory.41 But even as the Greek play became a regular event at Cambridge, the curriculum of the university no longer required ancient Greek. The appeal of these Greek plays was precisely the performance of a language less understood, by fewer students, with the passing of each year, thus making Cassandra a timely embodiment of this sense of foreignness. Cassandra appeared again on stage at Cambridge, twenty years later in The Oresteian Trilogy of Aeschylus Acted, in the Original Greek, by Members of the University, and directed by J. T. Sheppard. In reviewing this production, many newspapers took it as an opportunity to comment on the state of Greek studies at the university. As noted in the Yorkshire Post, It was the first performance of a Greek play at Cambridge since a year or so before the war, and the revival was cordially welcomed by a large audience. Cambridge has abandoned compulsory Greek in its curriculum, and it was extremely interesting, therefore, to find so large a number of The Spell of Greek 49

young men from our public schools capable of speaking Greek with the fluency necessary for a stage performance.42 The Daily Telegraph further observed, It is an odd, ironical comment upon the way we do things in England that an English audience has never been permitted to see the one Greek trilogy until Greek ceased to be a compulsory subject at the Universities. There may be some who are moved to salute the performance of the “Oresteia” at Cambridge as the swan song of Greek in our country.43 If this production was indeed the “swan song of Greek,” it was associated in particular with the doomed Cassandra, “the most tragic figure in all drama, unique in pathos and unparalleled in the horror of her fate,” as noted in the Times: “She appears like a swan in the last song of grief. Many remember the famous acting of Mr. Crace, of King’s, which set a standard for the part on the last occasion when it was played at Cambridge.”44 In contrast to Crace’s somber Cassandra in 1900, Cassandra was played in 1921 by W. Le B. Egerton of Trinity, swathed in white like a dying swan (Figure 1.2). His performance was praised as another “striking success” and “a tour de force” in the Daily Telegraph: “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.”45 Other reviewers also singled out Egerton, “whose acting and delivery were both perfect, and whose enunciation of the passionate metres was a delight to the ear.”46 The musicality of his performance corresponded to Sheppard’s larger vision of the Oresteia as “a dramatic symphony” in three movements, where “each movement has its own dramatic scheme, built up on simple musical designs.”47 Since, according to Sheppard, “Pity is the first note and the last of Cassandra’s scene,”48 it seems that Egerton’s dramatic performance struck the right note to amplify this musical design. But despite the fluency of his enunciation, audiences still required a bilingual text to understand the play. Reporting on his experience as a member of the audience, a reviewer for the Times wrote that “the cast—all male members of the University—have shown such devotion to their work that the expression and the gesture, all carried through with ease of manner, make it a fairly simple matter to follow the text of the play, the English verse translation of which has been admirably done by Mr. R. C. Trevelyan, of Trinity College.”49 In the acting edition for this performance, English and Greek are printed on facing pages to make the performance more intelligible, like the acting edition 50

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for Agamemnon in 1900. But unlike Swanwick’s earlier translation, Trevelyan’s translation of the Cassandra scene incorporates the Greek syllables into English: “Otototoi O Earth! Earth! O Apollo! O Apollo!” Trevelyan also preserves the double entendre when Cassandra calls Apollo her destroyer, by translating the line ὢπολλον . . . ἀπόλλων ἐμος (ll. 1080–1081, with a pun on the Greek verb apollumi, “to destroy or perish”) quite literally as “Apollo indeed to me.”50 Thus, on the stage and on the page, Sheppard’s Oresteia sought to recreate the original effects of the Greek language on its English audience. Not all members of the audience were convinced that this production was an “authentic” reproduction, however. A review by Arnold Bennett conceded that “doubtless the Oresteia is a masterpiece,” but “to say that it is performed in Greek is to play with words,” as he went on to grumble: It is performed in a spoken medium which a tiny majority of persons residing on a small island lying off the western coasts of Europe have agreed among themselves shall be called Greek. Nobody not brought up at an English public school could even seize the mere words, and of the people brought up at English public schools probably not more than .01 (likelier .001) per cent could seize the mere words. If Aeschylus himself could have sat in the New Theatre, Cambridge, he would hardly have guessed that his own work was being performed.  .  .  . The sounds of the words were not Greek, the timbre of the voices was not Greek, nor the emphasis, nor the intonations, nor the vocal rise and fall of the sentences.51 What was performed on stage was not the revival of ancient Greek as a spoken language, but a peculiar pronunciation that was neither English nor Greek, a tongue neither living nor dead. Of course the peculiarity of this interlingual experience would appeal to Woolf, who took a special interest in Sheppard’s Oresteia. Indeed, his production may have prompted her decision to go back to translating the Agamemnon. She was friendly with Sheppard, and makes note in her diary of her sister Vanessa “having been to Cambridge, seen the Greek play” (Diary II, 98). In 1922, as she was starting to work on her Agamemnon notebook, she wrote to Trevelyan, “I want to discuss your Aeschylus with you” (Letters V, 236), perhaps to compare his translation with her own. Although she had chosen to transcribe Verrall’s text, the layout of her notebook looks more like Trevelyan’s translation. Instead of placing Greek on the left page and English on the right, she followed the format of the acting editions of the Cambridge Greek play, with Greek on the right page and English on the left. This transposition suggests that Woolf ’s reading of the Agamemnon, influenced by The Spell of Greek 51

recent performances of the play, moved in many directions—not only from Greek to English and from English to Greek, but also from text to theater and from theater to text.

OTOTOTOI Woolf ’s notebook is an imaginative restaging of the Agamemnon, figuratively in the mind’s eye and also more literally in the movement of the eye over the page. Looking again at the page reproduced from the Agamemnon notebook (Figure 1), we can see how it opens a space to move freely across, around, between, and through the words. If the eye moves “forward” from left to right, we are reading “backward” from the modern to the ancient language, and so projecting English back into the Greek. But if the eye moves from Greek to English, from the “original” text to the “translation,” we find ourselves reading in reverse from the right side of the page to the left. At the same time the eye must also move up, down, and sideways, as some of the English translation has migrated across the fold to the Greek side of the page, where there are notes written in a column down the right margin: sometimes in English, sometimes in Greek letters, corresponding to words underlined within the Greek text. These various marks complicate a straightforward sequential reading: scanning the text horizontally, vertically, and diagonally, the eye’s oscillation over the spatial and temporal field of the page is anything but linear. In reorienting the space of the page along various axes and vectors of reading—on another occasion Woolf marvelled “how Greek sticks, darts, eels in & out” (Diary V, 236)—she is recreating a theatrical encounter with Greek that leaves the reader in limbo, much as the spectacle of Cassandra in the theater suspended the audience between languages. This movement between English and Greek is not unlike the texts that Woolf loved to read in the Loeb Classical Library. Reviewing a new Loeb edition a few years before she started the Agamemnon notebook, Woolf counted herself among “lovers of Greek” who discovered in these bilingual editions the possibility of an interlingual experience.With ancient Greek text and modern English translation on facing pages, the juxtaposition of languages allowed for various forms of linguistic transposition, moving freely from one language to the other, back and forth, and in between. “The Loeb library, with its Greek or Latin on one side of the page and its English on the other, came as a gift of freedom,” Woolf wrote at the beginning of her review.52 Insisting that no translation can “reproduce . . . all that we feel before we understand the meaning of the original words,” Woolf valued the parallel text of the Loeb editions as another 52

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approach to the “original” words, a way of standing before the Greek to “feel” its strangeness, even “before we understand the meaning” (Essays II, 115). The first Greek example Woolf cites in her review is, not coincidentally, “the misunderstood Aeschylus.” On the one hand, she maintains “it is important to read quickly” for a reader who wants to believe “he knows precisely what Aeschylus meant” (Essays II, 115). On the other hand the reader must recognize the untenability of such knowledge. According to Woolf, the Loeb editions allow for this double understanding, of simultaneously knowing and not knowing Greek, an argument that anticipates her later essay, “On not Knowing Greek.” While making ancient Greek accessible to modern readers, the Loeb Classical Library also shows us how “Greek is an immensely difficult language” and “for this reason we shall never be independent of our Loeb,” she concludes. Indeed, “the more we own the difficulty . . . the more we must testify to the miracle of the language” and so “fall once more beneath the spell” of Greek (Essays II, 115–116). For Woolf, the spell of Greek was not only an encounter with the literality of Greek letters, as I have suggested, but a way to recognize the materiality of language before its meaning is understood. Reading Greek in the Loeb editions, Woolf claimed to discover “all the sorrow, the passion, or the joy that words can say, or, more marvellously still, leave unsaid” (Essays II, 118). What is left unspoken could be idealized as something beyond language, but is better understood as something materialized by and in language, as the interruption of its own speaking: something embedded in language that can’t be grasped as meaning, but giving us the sense of a lack of sound as well as the sound of what is lacking in sense. As a dead language, no longer spoken, ancient Greek seems to make this vivid and visible. Woolf ’s review of the Loeb editions is called “The Perfect Language,” because Greek demonstrates the barbarism of the language we speak and call our own: “Here we have the peculiar magic, the lure that will lead us from youth to age, groping through our island fogs and barbarities toward that unattainable perfection” (Essays II, 116). Its perfection has the peculiar (or magical) effect of estranging English speakers from their native tongue, and revealing a foreign element in every language that Woolf (eager to “own the difficulty”) also found in her own. The interlingual experience of reading between English and Greek therefore opens up an intralingual experience, a moment when English seems as foreign as Greek, and perhaps even barbaric when compared to Greek. We might call this moment the “Cassandra effect,” and it is re-enacted in the theater of Woolf ’s Agamemnon notebook. Before Cassandra begins to speak, Clytemnestra wonders if she has a barbarian voice (ll. 1051: φωνὴν βάρβαρον) The Spell of Greek 53

or might understand Greek: “Nay, if her foreign tongue is anything less unintelligible than a swallow’s twitter, my reason urged is spoken within her understanding.” In transcribing Verrall’s translation, Woolf inserts the adjective “unintelligible” in place of “uncouth,” a rare departure from Verrall’s text that emphasizes her own interest in the radical unintelligibility of Cassandra’s first utterance.53 What is heard from Cassandra is a stutter, hovering between sound and signification. The flow of vowels is stopped by consonants, interrupting the voicing of the O in the outcry otototoi popoi, and further eliding the vocative in o’pollon o’pollon. The punctuation of the voice is represented by Woolf in English, through ellipses that she has transcribed directly from Verrall’s translation: ‘Ah! . . . O God! . . . Apollo, O Apollo!’ The dots between the exclamation ‘Ah!’ and the vocative ‘O’ indicate something that is silenced in the very act of invocation, turning Cassandra’s cry into an elliptical utterance: a staccato sound reduced to a series of punctuation marks. Pointing to the untranslatability of this cry, the deployment of ellipses (as so often in Woolf ’s own prose) signals something that remains inaudible, and can only be visualized graphically on the page. The chorus struggles to make sense of this stuttering invocation to Apollo, in which Cassandra seems destroyed by her own utterance. “What means this sad cry on the name of Loxias?” they ask Cassandra, or, if we move from the English to the Greek side of Woolf ’s notebook, τί ταῦτ’ ἀνωτότυξας: “why do you say otototoi?” Cassandra’s speech seems barbaric in the literal sense: a repetition of syllables that sounds like the stammering of bar . . . bar . . . bar, without differentiation into meaning. Just as Clytemnestra wonders if Cassandra is a barbarian speaking in “a swallow’s twitter,” the chorus compares the “illomened cry” of “the strange woman” standing before them to the sound of a bird, twittering in a language before and beyond human articulation: “Thou art in some sort crazed by the god who hurries thy thoughts, and wailest thyself in a wild tune, like some brown nightingale that with singing never-sated laments, alas, heart-sore, for Itys, Itys, all her sorrow-filled days.” Of course this is not just any bird, but a literary figure: the nightingale who sings “Itys Itys” is an allusion to Philomela, who sings of her violation even after her tongue is cut off. By speaking otototoi, or singing itus, itus (the meaningless marks of pure iteration), Cassandra simultaneously defies translation and demands to be translated. Destroyed by her own prophetic utterance, she sings of the god who has destroyed her, in an untranslatable pun: “Apollo, Apollo of the Gate, a very Apollo to me.” Although Cassandra gradually makes herself understood in the play, she embodies something untranslatable in Greek, and in any language: her naked cry reveals the foreign element within language that sounds like the 54

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twittering of a bird and swallows up meaning. The effect of Cassandra, in other words, is to reveal the nakedness of language itself in its most material form as a mere concatenation of sound or letters without signification. This momentary effect, when language materializes as a strange revelation of its own opacity, explains why Woolf was fascinated with ancient Greek for so long. In a letter from 1916, she wrote, “I am—or was—reading Greek! I can’t make out what the fascination of Greek is, seeing that I have to look out every other word, and then fit them together like a puzzle” (Letters II, 32). The experience of reading Greek—looking up the words and puzzling to fit them together—is a scene of reading made visible in the Agamemnon notebook, and refracted throughout her fiction, as many readers of Woolf have noticed. Rowena Fowler describes in further detail not only how “the Greeks haunted Woolf ” but how Greek haunts the characters in Woolf ’s novels as well.54 In The Years, for example, when Edward is studying the Antigone, he experiences the “quickening” of a dead language: He read; and made a note; then he read again. All sounds were blotted out. He saw nothing but the Greek in front of him. But as he read, his brain gradually warmed; he was conscious of something quickening and tightening in his forehead. . . . Little negligible words now revealed shades of meaning.55 The blotting out of sound makes Greek visible and increasingly vivid, allowing the language to come to life and reveal (in a phrase reminiscent of Harrison’s description of Greek) new “shades of meaning.” However the “shades of meaning” revealed by Greek are at the very limit of language, as Emily Dalgarno goes on to suggest in her reading of Woolf ’s Agamemnon. Dalgarno traces the impact of Greek translation on Woolf ’s narrative techniques and tropes, including the recurring trope of birds singing in Greek: here “Greek stands for the most distant horizon of intelligibility, the point beyond which the sane mind does not reach.”56 Thus in Mrs. Dalloway, a sparrow seems to chirp the name of Septimus “and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words . . . and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words.”57 Like Cassandra figured as a twittering swallow, the twitter of the London sparrows is a figure for a moment of madness where language seems radically foreign to itself, disconnected from meaning. And of course, the mad Cassandra in Woolf ’s notebook resonates with the description of Woolf ’s own madness, as recalled by Leonard Woolf: The Spell of Greek 55

When she was at her worst and her mind was completely breaking down again the voices flew ahead of her thoughts: and she actually heard voices which were not her voice; for instance, she thought she heard the sparrows outside her window talking Greek. When that happened to her, in one of her attacks, she became incoherent because what she was hearing and the thoughts flying ahead of her became completely disconnected.58 In her biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee cautions against reading the Greektalking sparrows in the tree too literally: “But is there, perhaps, something fishy about these birds?” she asks.59 Lee emphasizes the literary context for representing these auditory hallucinations, since the trope is repeated not only in Woolf ’s fiction but also in her essay “On Not Knowing Greek,” where the choruses of Greek tragedy are described as “undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in the pauses of the wind” (30). The point I want to keep in view, through my own elliptical reading of Woolf ’s Agamemnon notebook, is not that we are reading these voices too literally, as if Woolf really heard birds singing in Greek, but that we are not reading these voices literally enough, as an encounter with Greek letters that can never be heard. Although Woolf liked to imagine the choral odes of Greek tragedy as bird-song, her essay insists that “for the most part the choruses, with all their obscurities, must be spelt out” (30). So also we should read Cassandra’s twittering as the translation of a mad spell simultaneously into and out of the experience of reading Greek. In her notebook, Woolf transposed, transcribed, and transliterated the remarkable episode of Cassandra, returning us to that strange scene of reading where we can see the complex interplay between theatrical and textual performances of translation. Presented on stage and re-presented on the page, ὀτοτοτοῖ performs the mad literality of Greek letters, the spectacle of being on the far side of language.

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Chapter Two

ΙΩ

in Prometheus Bound So Harsh a Chain of Suffering

Virginia Woolf ’s dramatic encounter with Aeschylus—and with the literality of Greek letters that resist translation, as we have seen—is part of a longer history of women who also encountered ancient Greek through Aeschylean tragedy. To enact the problems and possibilities of translating a dead language, they turned to Prometheus Bound in particular, as a performance of classical literacy that revolved around the question of “literal” translation. This tragedy inspired a wide range of political readings in the nineteenth century: Prometheus as radical rebel, crucified martyr, national hero, prophetic philosopher, intellectual humanist, antimonarchist, sublime Satan, and so on. But it is also a play about the politics of reading and writing, since Prometheus proclaims he gave the Greek alphabet to men along with the gift of fire: “I taught to mankind the composition of letters (grammata) which is the memory of all things.”1 As a new technology for memorization in archaic Greece, the invention of alphabetic script became a conventional metaphor for memory itself, used by Prometheus in narrating the story of Io. When she appears on stage in the shape of a cow, driven mad by Zeus’s desire and Hera’s wrath, Prometheus predicts her future: “First to you, Io, I will tell the tale of your sorrowful wandering, which you must write in the memory tablets of your heart” (788–789). Io must memorize the words of Prometheus by embodying them—inscribing the letters on the deltos (writing tablet) of her phrenes (the part of the body where the spirit lives and breathes)—so that she may read and remember them as her own story. It was an Aeschylean innovation to introduce Io into the story of Prometheus. In contrast to the god who is bound to suffer on a rock in the middle of nowhere, she is a mortal bound to suffer by wandering everywhere. She enters the tragedy dancing and singing in wild anapests, asking “to what land have I, wretched one, wandered?” (564–565: ὅποι γῆς ὁ μογερὰ πεπλάνημαι), and she exits again in anapests, with her mind “wandering” off course (878: φρενοπληγεῖς). She embodies the mobility of Greek letters, without knowing where she will go or where they will get her, until Prometheus reveals the full 57

course of her suffering. Indeed the root of the verb “to go” is inscribed in the letters of her name, and it is predicted by Prometheus that Io will go across Europe and Asia to the very edges of the earth. In Topographies of Hellenism, Artemis Leontis observes that “Prometheus quite literally maps Io’s destiny” by narrating the geographical details of her wanderings, and that “Io must engrave this map within . . . so as to recollect the signposts of suffering from her private map.”2 The writing internalized by Io is also externalized, as the grammata written on her body will be marked on the land she traverses; the print of her hoof looks like the omega in ΙΩ, and she leaves the traces of her name on the Ionian Sea and the Bosporus (“the path of the cow”). In this way, Io’s ongoing story plays out a continual confusion between literal and figurative inscription of Greek letters. How are we to read the memorable scene with Io? Throughout Prometheus Bound there are metaphors of reading and writing that make the theater into a graphic space for mobilizing the Greek alphabet. Playing out the relation between literacy and orality in ancient Greece, Greek tragedy was performed from a written script memorized by actors, who also had to inscribe Greek letters on the tablet of their memory. Theatrical representation could be seen as a performance of literacy, by the actors who would internalize the script and by the spectators who would “read” what was scripted for the theater. The simultaneous internalization and externalization of the written word is especially pertinent to Prometheus Bound, where the central actor memorized writing in order to represent and embody the god of writing.3 Prometheus is also inscribed with Greek letters, like Io, and indeed his tortured immobility has the same cause as her tortured mobility: their suffering is scripted to make visible the tyranny of Zeus, who tortures one with his eros and the other with his ire. Just as Prometheus teaches Io to read the letters inscribed on her body, he teaches the chorus in the play, and by extension the audience of the play, to read the tragic spectacle of his own suffering body. From the god who invented the Greek alphabet, the audience learns to read the political implications of literacy, including its sexual politics. Having taught the composition of letters to mankind, Prometheus demonstrates the imposition of letters on the female body in particular. Writing on the deltos of Io is a sexual metaphor, making the discourse with Prometheus sound prophetic of her future intercourse with Zeus, the god who will leave his seed like a mark on her womb: the first letter of his name (Dios in the genitive) is a delta. As Deborah Steiner argues in The Tyrant’s Writ, the Io episode dramatizes “the equivocation that lies at the heart of so many Greek representations of writing,” since writing could be used for the institution of democracy to guarantee the 58

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freedom of citizens or for the imposition of tyranny, especially on women and slaves.4 If “the paradox of Greek accounts of writing is that they simultaneously disguise and expose the coercive properties at the heart of alphabetic script” (248), then Io is the embodiment of that paradox, dramatizing both the pathos and the eros of Greek letters written on her body. The dramatization of literacy in Prometheus Bound sets the stage for the reception of the tragedy in translation, performed not only for audiences in antiquity but for a long history of readers as well. Prometheus Bound was the first play of Aeschylus to be translated into English in 1773, and as other translations followed in the course of the nineteenth century, the play was not much acted on stage but more often enacted by translators as a textual performance.5 In transcribing and translating the Greek alphabet, each translator was “bound,” with various degrees of freedom and constraint, to the text of Prometheus Bound. The translator’s bondage could be played out through identification with Prometheus, whose defiant rhetoric inspired an abundance of scholarly translations and poetic imitations in the wake of Romanticism. With Byron’s revolutionary Prometheus, or Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” it became increasingly possible to imagine a “free” version that would liberate the Promethean translator from his bonds and allow the play to be imagined in new ways.6 Along with classical scholars and Romantic poets, an increasing number of women also made a claim to classical literacy through translating Prometheus Bound. Lorna Hardwick observes that translating this tragedy became a rite of passage for women, who discovered various kinds of empowerment and subversion in writing their own versions of Prometheus, and Isobel Hurst further argues that “translations of classical texts by women writers reveal critiques of nineteenth-century gender politics, particularly when it comes to such texts as Prometheus Bound.”7 But in looking for empowerment and critique in translations of Prometheus Bound, we should not overlook how women were bound to translate the play as a performance of subjection as well as mastery, making it a complex reiteration of nineteenth-century gender politics more than its critical subversion. What was at stake for women in translating the text of Aeschylus was not an assertion of autonomous subjectivity or free agency, but rather an exploration of female authorship mediated by ancient Greek, as a language that could never be completely mastered. Among the first English poets to attempt a complete verse translation of Prometheus Bound was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who published her version anonymously in 1833.8 As a young woman often immobilized by pain, E.B.B. began translating this tragedy less as an act of Promethean defiance than as a re-enactment of his suffering. In her translator’s “Preface,” she admired ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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how Prometheus “pours out his impassioned sorrow to the air, and winds, and waters, and earth and sun,”9 and her translation of his first speech recreates this sorrowful spectacle: Behold me, what I bear—a god from gods: Behold me, by what anguish worn, These eyes of mine shall weary turn Unto time’s myriad years. So harsh a chain of suffering, Hath form’d for me heav’n’s new-made king! Alas! Alas! My tears Alike for present and for future flow!— Where lies the bound’ry of my mighty woe? What do I say? All things, all future things, I view unclouded; nor can sorrow come Strange to my soul. (pp. 20–21) The sorrow of, and for, Prometheus is translated into an increasingly selfreflexive performance. The interpolation of “these eyes of mine” (a phrase that does not correspond to any part of the Greek text) makes Prometheus the one who beholds the spectacle of his suffering, all of which (by virtue of his name, which means “foresight”) he has already foreseen. Turning his eyes inward, his “I” is doubled grammatically as both object and subject: “behold me, what I bear,” he cries out, simultaneously seeing from the outside and feeling from the inside the chain of suffering that Zeus “hath form’d for me.” The external shame of his punishment is internalized by E.B.B.’s Prometheus as painful anguish: while he expresses outrage in Greek—the Aeschylean text emphasizes “worn down by such shameful punishment” (οἵαις αἰκείαισιν διακναιόμενος, ll. 93– 94) and “such shameful bondage” (δεσμὸν ἀεικῆ, l. 97)—in this English version, he describes himself “by what anguish worn” and painfully laments “so harsh a chain of suffering.” Indeed, to emphasize the binding of Prometheus as a body marked by pain, the manuscript for this translation has marked several lines through the word “stern” and substituted “harsh,” underlined for emphasis.10 In translating Prometheus Bound, E.B.B. intensified the Promethean rhetoric of suffering, binding him again in the lines of her own verse. In the transition from blank verse to lyric meter, he is entangled in longer and shorter lines that seem to recreate his chain of suffering. Tightening the knot, the shortest line begins with a cry of pain: “Alas Alas!” Here the exclamation φεῦ φεῦ (expressing both pain and anger in Greek) has been made into a lamentation to amplify his 60

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sorrow. Likewise the verb στενάχω (“I groan”) has been translated into a phrase that makes Prometheus weep in sympathy for the pathos of his own neverending sorrows: “My tears / Alike for present and for future flow!—/ Where lies the bound’ry of my mighty woe?” The English pun on “bound’ry” reiterates the woeful bondage of Prometheus, while also emphasizing that there are no bounds to his woe. Prometheus incorporates the necessity of his own suffering: “nor can sorrow / come strange to my soul,” he concludes, accepting just a few lines later that he must embody this sorrowful bondage, prescribed and inscribed in the very title of Prometheus Bound: “View me a bound and sorrowing god” (21). Of course, Prometheus willingly subjects himself to suffering in order to defy Zeus, as he exclaims toward the end of the tragedy: “Admit not in thy thought / That I fear-struck by Jove, shall prove a woman, / And supplicate him, loathed as he is, / With feminine upliftings of mine hands, / To free me from these chains” (52–53). Yet even while Prometheus refuses to “prove a woman,” E.B.B. does prove a woman by subjecting herself to a Greek text that produced a feminized performance of pain in English: in repeating the boundless sorrow of Prometheus, the translator would never be free from her bondage to this text. E.B.B. admitted in her translator’s Preface that any attempt at a literal translation is bound to fail, and begged forgiveness from the reader: “To the literal sense I have endeavoured to bend myself as closely as was poetically possible; but if, after all,—and it is too surely the case,—‘quantum mutatus!’ must be applied; may the reader say so rather sorrowfully than severely, and forgive my English for not being Greek, and myself for not being Aeschylus” (11). In the endeavor to “bend . . . as closely as was poetically possible” to Greek, E.B.B.’s translation seemed to produce ever more sorrow. Other women who translated the tragedy after E.B.B. were bound to repeat “so harsh a chain of suffering” as well. Considering a chain of translations by women leading from the nineteenth into the twentieth century—several English versions by Augusta Webster, Anna Swanwick, and Janet Case, and some American versions by Annie Fields, Edith Hamilton, and Eva Palmer Sikelianos—this chapter will demonstrate how they re-enacted the translator’s bondage, not as an opposition of “free” versus “literal” translation but as a dynamic of entanglement, repeated each time with a difference. Nineteenthcentury debates about translation often revolved around the question of “faithful” translation, with different standards of “fidelity” according to a wide range of translational practices: every translator found himself or herself entangled in shifting ideas about translating literally, and the value of literalism in translation. But for the women who translated Prometheus Bound these questions ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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were often articulated in specifically gendered ways. Rather than claiming empowerment these women performed subjection to power, by intensifying the rhetoric of suffering of Prometheus as the central figure of the play, and also by identifying with the seemingly marginal Io. Just as Io learns by heart the letters inscribed on her body, women translators memorized and incorporated ancient Greek into a body of writing that suffers the problem of literal translation. Through Io it is possible for them (and me) to spell out a question about reading and writing Greek letters that lies at the heart of the tragedy: if a fixation on the Greek alphabet was a way to put letters in motion, where did women go with it, and what did they get from it? Wandering around the edges of the earth, Io came to embody what E.B.B. called “Greek upon the margin—Lady’s Greek.” Yet even as she was written in the margins of literary history, the wandering Io became an increasingly mobile figure for classical literacy, classical translation, and classical transmission.

Greek Verbs in Me We have already glimpsed how passionately the young Elizabeth Barrett desired to make herself into a Woman of Greek Letters. “To be a good linguist is the height of my ambition & I do not believe that I can ever cease desiring to obtain this!!” she wrote at the age of fourteen, in “Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character.”11 Yet Greek grammar also proved a difficult daily discipline: “This is tormenting & sometimes agitates me to a painful & almost nervous degree,” she confessed, recalling herself “entangled in one of these perplexities crying very heartily for half an hour because I did not understand Greek!!!” Three exclamation points at the end of the sentence point emphatically to the “tormenting” and “painful” agitation of being “entangled” in ancient Greek. This curious conflation of textual and physical torment anticipated her entanglement a decade later in the text of Prometheus Bound, where the binding of Prometheus dramatized the ways in which she found herself bound by translating Greek. The diaries and letters of E.B.B. record the years that she devoted to Greek, especially when she was living with her family at the Hope End estate (1809– 1832). Looking back on these years, she recalled Hope End as “a retirement scarcely broken to me except by books & my own thoughts,” where she “read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian— gathered visions from Plato & the dramatists—eat [sic] & drank Greek & made my head ache with it” (BC 7: 354). The experience of learning the language was figured by E.B.B. as the incorporation of letters into her body, not only 62

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eating and drinking Greek, but also breathing, sleeping, and dreaming Greek: it became part of her thoughts, giving her daily inspiration but also making her head ache with thinking in Greek. On a sheet of paper dated May 1, 1832, titled “Number of lines which I can repeat,” she tallied up a subtotal of 3280 lines of prose in biblical and classical Greek, and 4720 lines of Greek verse (including Homer 330, Aeschylus 1800, Sophocles 420, Euripides 350, Pindar 90), totaling 8000 lines that she had memorized.12 No matter how agitating, this remarkable feat of memorization certainly merits more exclamation points (!!!). In the early 1830s, E.B.B. had been reading Aeschylus in particular: “Very busy today. Reading Aeschylus & learning the verb τυπτω!!” she wrote in June of 1831, trying to beat the Greek verb tupto (“to beat, strike, smite”) into her memory.13 And again the next day she complained, “Such a miserable day! . . . I sate [sic] down in my armchairs to put the verbs in μι in me” (Diary 21). For E.B.B. the memorization of Greek verbs was a process of internalization, putting Greek mi-verbs into “me” and thus identifying herself with letters of the Greek alphabet. This identification was played out like Io, as the deformation of a girl into a cow: “After breakfast I began to chew the cud of such bitter thoughts . . . that I was glad to begin to graze, instead, on the verbs in μι. I have learnt them & τυπτω. . . . It certainly was disgraceful that I who can read Greek with some degree of fluency, should have been such & so long an ignoramus about the verbs” (Diary 22–23). Learning Greek verbs by heart and inscribing them on the tablets of her memory, E.B.B. turned “me” into the “I” of Io: a melancholy incorporation of dead letters into her own living body. During this time, she was mourning the death of her mother in 1828, and also anticipating the loss of her family home; her father was preparing to sell Hope End, and she too was at the end of hope. Verging on hysteria, she fell ill toward the end of 1830 and turned ever more passionately to Greek as a displacement of her despair. She filled her time with visits to Hugh Stuart Boyd, a middle-aged blind scholar residing nearby, to study Greek together: sometimes she read Greek texts to him out loud, sometimes he recited to her long passages of Greek that he had memorized, sometimes she recited Greek grammar that she had memorized, sometimes they discussed the finer points of textual scholarship on Greek, sometimes they compared metrical or critical analysis of Greek literature, and sometimes they exchanged translations from Greek. These exchanges were charged with a passion for Greek, as she later recalled in a poem dedicated to Boyd: And I think of those long mornings Which my thought goes far to seek ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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When, betwixt the folio’s turnings, Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek: Past the pane the mountain spreading, Swept the sheep’s-bell’s tinkling noise, While a girlish voice was reading Somewhat low for αι’s and οι’s.14 The stanza presents a pastoral idyll where “rhythmic Greek” flows like a river through the landscape of memory, but within this idealized scene of reading, the “girlish voice” that tries to read Greek letters aloud is “somewhat low” and cannot quite be heard: inscribed in the ais and ois is something she cannot speak, as the diphthongs hint at distress or hesitation about how to stress the right pronunciation. Implicit in those long mornings “betwixt the folio’s turnings” is a long mourning, no longer audible but perhaps legible in a dead language that is no longer spoken. Remembering the various Greek texts that E.B.B. read together with Boyd, including classical authors and the Church Fathers, the poem is haunted by secret sense of painful pleasure and plaintive desire: “Do you mind that deed of Atè / Which you bound me to so fast / Reading ‘De Virginitate’ / From the first line to the last?” Here Atè is made to rhyme with “Virginitate,” conflating the evil goddess who appears in “Epistulae de Virginitate” with the madness of memorizing so much Greek for a young girl, who was herself “bound . . . so fast” to read and be read like a Greek text, “from the first line to the last.” Critics have speculated in various ways about the intensity of this pedagogical relation with Boyd.15 After its rediscovery in 1961, The Diary of E.B.B. was published with a preface of “Psychoanalytical Observations by Robert Coles, M.D.,” diagnosing her as a young woman “nervous, moody, excitable, fearfully attached to her father” who “ ‘transferred’ her devotion from her father to Mr. Boyd, twenty-five years older, blind, highly educated and—rather like Mr. Barrett—able to be a literary companion.”16 But reading the Diary by E.B.B. from a literary perspective, we can understand it not only in terms of transference from one person to another, but as a fixation on Greek letters themselves: a primal scene (long before Freud inscribed Greek in the unconscious) where E.B.B. could consciously use Greek verbs in me to read and write the life of her own psyche. While narrating the psychological drama of her visits to Mr. Boyd, the diary also revisited these scenes of reading Greek to turn them into a scene of writing. In the margins of the Greek texts, she read with Boyd, and in the marginalia of her own Diary (copied out in Lady’s Greek, without the accents), E.B.B. found a space for her own writing: “I have been reading over again what I read with him yesterday, & writing in the margin such remarks of his as I could 64

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remember,” E.B.B. wrote in her diary, thus re-marking his remarks for her own writerly purposes (Diary 17). Boyd was especially interested in Aeschylus, since he had published a verse translation of Agamemnon in 1823 (with some of his own verses appended). He led E.B.B. through the entire corpus of Aeschylean tragedy, and in the summer of 1831 they started reading Prometheus Bound together. In July, E.B.B. noted that they had “talked comparatively about Homer Aeschylus & Shakespeare: and positively about Aeschylus’s Prometheus” (Diary 43), and a few days later she added that she had “heard him recite some of the Prometheus” (Diary 59). A diary entry from August describes E.B.B. falling in love with the play: “Mr. Boyd wishes to learn forty more lines out of the Prometheus: & in search of them, I read to him nearly the whole of the last scenes of the Prometheus. I quite love the Prometheus. It is an exquisite creation: & besides,—I was so happy when I read the first scenes of that play!” (Diary 91). It is difficult to distinguish whether she loved “that play” because she associated Greek with the happy experience of talking with Mr. Boyd, or because she associated Mr. Boyd with the happy experience of reading Greek, as she wrote again in October: “I spent a happy day with him, hearing him repeat passages from the Prometheus, & conversing” (Diary 160). These moments of happiness, filled with eros and pathos, were repeated in her memory and recorded in her diary as desire for ancient Greek: more a symptom of her melancholia than a release from it. As another repetition of this melancholy identification with a dead language, she turned from reading to translating Prometheus Bound. In November, Boyd encouraged her “to translate the Prometheus into blank verse” and although at first E.B.B. “begged him to do it, instead of me,” she decided to do it herself in January of 1832 (Diary 180). By February 15 she wrote: “I have finished my translation. 1075 lines of Aeschylus translated in a fortnight. And I think I am satisfied—tolerably satisfied. But the original is too magnificent for translation” (Diary 216). She was disappointed by Boyd’s response, however: “Took courage & told Mr. B of my translation of the Prometheus. He seemed pleased, & surprised at my having done so much, & so unparaphrastically. I asked him inconsiderately, if he wd. read it, if he wd read some part of it!—His answer did not please me: and yet he did not say ‘I will not’ ” (Diary 212). It seems there was some displeasure on both sides, as his claim to scholarly expertise came into conflict with her claim to poetic expertise. Boyd disapproved of the Greek text she had used (she had referred to Bothe’s edition whereas he preferred Blomfield, and after a day of “conferring Bothe & Blomfield” at his urging, she deferred to Boyd: “I do wish I had translated from Blomfield”17) and he also found much to disapprove in her English versification: “After some ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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verbal criticism, he observed with regard to the blank verses that some of the lines were beautiful, some poor: a circumstance for which he did not so much blame me, as Aeschylus. It could not be otherwise in any literal translation of the Prometheus. With regard to the lyrical portions of the extract, they seemed to him ‘rather poor,’ considering they were my writing” (Diary 222). It seemed, in other words, that “any literal translation” of the Greek text would fail in being simultaneously too literal and not literal enough. Early in her correspondence with Boyd, they had already debated the question of translating literally from Greek. When Boyd first sent some of his Greek translations to E.B.B, as a way of introducing himself in 1827, she responded in particular to his version of a passage from Sophocles’ Electra, which she considered “beautifully executed to the spirit as well as the letter; and speaking of it, I may observe with Denham, that ‘words are not only rendered into words, but poetry into poetry’ ” (BC 2:38). Yet she took exception to a line that he should have translated more literally, in her opinion: “Nothing is much more odious than a servile translation: but, in this instance, it seems hardly possible to preserve the striking and pathetic simplicity of the original, without adopting a verbal fidelity.”18 Although she preferred the freedom of the poet who translates “the spirit,” rather than the “servile translation” of a scholar who translates “the letter,” she also invoked “verbal fidelity” as a necessary constraint for poetic translation. Indeed, in another letter she insisted that the translator should think the letter and the spirit, or the body and the soul, in relation to each other. This is what she claimed to admire in Boyd’s rendering of Greek at its best: “Translation has been sometimes called the body weighing down the soul of original composition,” she wrote to Boyd, “but certainly in your case, ‘One might almost say the body thought’—Your language has so much animation &,—may I use the expression?,—so much transparency” (BC 2: 83).19 This ideal of “transparency” is precisely what was lacking in her own translation of Prometheus Bound, according to Boyd: her translation was a body weighing down too much the soul of the original composition. The double bind for E.B.B. was that she was bound to paraphrase in the very attempt to translate Aeschylus “unparaphrastically.” Adapting Dryden’s distinction among three degrees of translation (metaphrase, paraphrase, imitation), she set aside an attempt at “literal” metaphrase or “free” imitation, and sought instead introduce a fourth term by distinguishing between different kinds of paraphrase. But between “unparaphrastic” and “paraphrastic” translation she found herself entangled in the same paradox: while her translation might come closer to the letter in the former and closer to the spirit in the latter, she would never be completely bound nor completely unbound by the text of Prometheus Bound. 66

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Rather than resolving the translator’s bondage, her solution was to perform it even more dramatically in the body of her translation by emphasizing the body in her translation. Thus the spirit could be thought through the letter, and vice versa, as another way to demonstrate how “the BODY THOUGHT.” Translating Prometheus, E.B.B. put his body dramatically on display: Then let the shaggy lightning be With double sharpness cast on me! Let air be lacerate with thunder, And with the savage wind’s convulsion; And earth’s foundations rooted under, Shudder to the blast’s impulsion; And let the waters of the deep Their foam with dreadful roaring heap Along the planets’ heavn’ly way; And let him hurl my body low To Tartarus, impell’d to go By eddies strong of fated woe! (54) In the stormy language of this passage, Prometheus invokes a figurative storm to be literally played out on his body. He calls upon the lightning to be “with double sharpness cast on me,” and he is himself lacerated and convulsed by the air “lacerate with thunder” and “the savage wind’s convulsion.” Just as the earth will “shudder to the blast’s impulsion,” so also his body will shudder with pain. In her manuscript, E.B.B originally wrote “with thunder let the air be rent” and “let the earth’s rooted fundament / Tremble to the blast’s impulsion,” but she revised these lines to intensify the physical violence inflicted on Prometheus, turning “rent” into “lacerate” and “tremble” into “shudder.”20 Through this violent rhetoric, cast in the third-person imperative, Prometheus transforms the power of Zeus into a powerful form of self-inflicted suffering that makes his body visible. “Let him hurl my body low,” he cries out, turning the necessity of his suffering into a command: even if he is “impell’d to go / By eddies strong of fated woe,” his woe is propelled by the rhetorical power of his own speech. This literalization of figurative language is the culmination of the tragedy of Prometheus, whose cries of “woe” have been repeated and amplified by E.B.B. throughout her translation. “Ah me! ah me! ah me!” is his refrain at the beginning of the play (21–22), and when Io enters she repeats these cries of woe: “Ah me! ah me! ah me! Again the gad-fly spurs me, wretched maid!” (37) Like the ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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woeful spectacle of Prometheus, the suffering body of Io is also put on display in E.B.B.’s translation. Although her laments are different from his in Greek, E.B.B. makes them the same in English: the turn from subject to grammatical object—from “I” to “me” in “Ah me!”—emphasizes that both Prometheus and Io are objectified through their painful subjection to Zeus. E.B.B.’s translation further doubles their suffering when Io addresses Prometheus, in a rhetorical chiasmus where “thou” and “me” are intertwined in mutual misery: “Who canst thou be, / Oh miserable thou, who dost acclaim / Such true discourse to miserable me?” (38). Prometheus in turn addresses Io to “clearly name / Thy future woes,” much as he (true to his own name) has already foreseen his own present and future woes (44). Thus the story of Prometheus is identified with the story of Io. He tells the chorus that “wand’ring Woe / Sits at the feet of everyone by turns” (27), and when they “yearn to hear thy woful story,” he narrates the course of his own suffering not unlike the wandering of Io. So also, in response to the chorus who have “desired to learn her woes, / herself narrating them,” Prometheus addresses Io to narrate the rest of the “future woe” that she must suffer: “And Io, let thy soul revolve my words, / That thou mayst learn where end thy wanderings” (42). In telling her story, his words are to be inscribed on her memory: “Io, to thee, / Thy various wand’rings I will first unfold, / Which in the book-memorial of thy mind / Do thou inscribe” (45). As a gloss to this metaphor, E.B.B. added a footnote to her translation of this passage. She referred the reader to several other passages in Greek (“See the opening of the tenth Olymp., and Sophocles’s Θὲς δ’ ἐν φρενὸς δέλτοισι τοὺς ἐμους λόγους”) and then to Shakespeare: “Parallel thoughts respecting the tablet of Hamlet’s memory will be written upon the reader’s” (61). Extending the literary allusion in Greek to her own reading of English literature, E.B.B. made herself into a reader who has also inscribed the words of Prometheus on the tablet of her own memory. By transposing the metaphor of the writing tablet into a book, E.B.B.’s translation dramatized a double scene of inscription: the Greek words of Prometheus inscribed in Io’s memory were memorized by E.B.B. as well, who turned them into English words printed on paper and “bound” in a book. In this way, the body of her own writing was also put on display. Although the translation was begun as a private exercise, it became a public performance when it was published in 1833, a decision that E.B.B. immediately regretted. “How I have wished that I had never done so,” she confessed: “If I never had, I never should have been exposed to the pain which has been & is oppressing me” (Diary 217). She exposed herself to pain not only because Boyd disapproved of the publication, but because the translation itself was a deliberately painful performance, 68

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in which E.B.B. used the text of Prometheus Bound to perform her subjection to Greek as well as her mastery of it. Although E.B.B. published her translation anonymously, she included a Preface to define herself as translator. In this attempt to spell out her ideas about literal translation, she met with some resistance: “Finished the preface to my Prometheus,—& delivered it to Papa in the evening. I read it or rather spelt it aloud,—& in my opinion, he did not very much like it” (Diary 219). Her purpose in the Preface was to justify the need for a new translation, in the face of many other attempts to bring a dead language to life. She began with a rhetorical question to stake her own claim to classical literacy: “Although, among the various versions which have appeared of various ancient writers, we may recognize the dead, together with much of the living letter; a literal version, together with a transfusion of poetical spirit;—why should we, on that account, consider ourselves charmed away from attempting another translation?” (3). Using the metaphor of a mirror that “may be held in different lights by different hands,” she argued that “it is therefore desirable that the same composition should be conveyed by different minds” (3–4). Taking the argument one step further, she even suggested that multiple translations would serve to refract the light of the original text in such a way that “both the English reader and the Greek poet are benefited” (4). Not only would translation benefit the English reader and the Greek poet, but it would benefit English poetry as well, as E.B.B. aligned herself with other English poets who had translated Greek before her. Through a “transfusion of poetical spirit,” English poets might attempt to bring dead letters to life, as a process of literal translation and literary transmission that would “recognize the dead, together with much of the living letter.” Reading a Greek text in a series of English translations, like mirrors refracting each other, has the radical implication that the original may only be readable as a refraction: the translation comes before the original, which depends on poetic translators for its survival or afterlife. In defending the need for new poetic translations, E.B.B. therefore redefined the very idea of originality for modern English poets. “But the present age says, it has no need of translations from classic authors. It is, or it would be, an original age: it will not borrow thoughts with long genealogies. . . . Its poetry shall not be cold and polished and imitative poetry” (4). Contrary to this view, E.B.B. suggested that originality could emerge only through a more radical understanding of imitation: “I do not ask, I would not obtain, that our age should be servilely imitative of any former age. Surely it may think its own thoughts and speak its own words, yet not turn away from those who have thought and spoken well. The contemplation of excellence produces excellence, if not similar, yet parallel” (4–5). Rather than ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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striving for similarity in translation as a reflection of classic authors, translators of the present age must produce reflections on classic authors, according to E.B.B.: “We make them subjects of contemplation, in order to abstract from those ideas of beauty, afterwards embodied in our own productions” (5). So also, E.B.B made Aeschylus a subject of contemplation, afterwards embodied in the production of her own translation. In her Preface, she admired the impassioned language of Aeschylus, as a “fearless and impetuous” poet whose “language, even the most copious and powerful of languages, writhes beneath its impetuosity,” and she admired Prometheus in particular as “the character, in the conception and development of which, its author has concentrated his powers” (6). While conceding that the Agamemnon of Aeschylus may have more powerful language as a whole (with a nod to the English version of that tragedy by “the learned Mr. Boyd,” whose “eloquent translations” are enumerated in a long footnote), the Preface insists that the claim to excellence of Prometheus Bound rests “upon one fulcrum, the conception of character . . . to which the interest of the spectator is very strongly and almost exclusively attached” (7). According to E.B.B., “Prometheus stands eminent and alone; one of the most original, and grand, and attaching characters ever conceived by the mind of man” (8). Not only is the spectator “attached” to the character of Prometheus, but the character of Aeschylus is attached to Prometheus as well: “Aeschylus felt the force of his own portraiture: he never removes his Prometheus from the spectator’s sight.” Furthermore, the Preface suggests how the character of the translator may be attached to Prometheus, as she too “felt the force” of the text by translating it. According to E.B.B. “the striking nature of these, our first ideas of Prometheus is not enfeebled by any subsequent ones,” and she admired those passages in the play when she was forcefully, perhaps even painfully, struck by the sublime power of his language. In a footnote to her translation, for example, she singled out the speech where Prometheus sympathizes with Typhon, another Titan tortured by Zeus, as “one of the sublimest passages of poetry to lips most worthy to pronounce it,—to the lips of Prometheus” (58). Her translation emphasizes the sublime violence of “Th’embattled monster, him o’ the hundred heads, / Vehement Typhon, who opposed the gods, / Out-hissing slaughter from his horrid jaws,” and describes how “his strength / Was scorch’d and thunder-blasted from him” by the “headlong thunderbolt out-breathing fire” from Zeus, and how he is “compressed underneath Mount Aetna’s roots,” causing volcanic eruptions of rebellious rage: “Such wrath doth Typhon bubble forth, with darts / Hot, unapproachable, of fiery storm, / Though turn’d to cinder by the bolt of Jove” (29–30). 70

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In identifying with Typhon, Prometheus anticipates the storm toward the end of the tragedy, when, as we have already seen, he figuratively invokes but also literally provokes lightning and thunder from Zeus. His last speech erupts even more dramatically to fight fire with fire, translated by E.B.B. into the language of the sublime: In deed—in word no more— From her stillness Earth is thrust! And growls the thunder’s echoed roar And glares the lightning’s eddied fire; And the whirlwinds wheel the dust; And blasts of every wind outleap, Each to each with confluent ire; And air is mingled with the deep. Such fearful curses visibly Jove’s right-hand impelleth hither. O, my mother’s pride!—O, aether! To all light-rolling; dost thou see How I suffer wrongfully? (55–56) While Zeus sends thunder and lightning down from above, Prometheus sends up from below a volcanic explosion of language: like “the fiery storm” of Typhon, Prometheus reinvokes “the thunder’s echoed roar” and “the lightning’s eddied fire” against Zeus, making the earth quake like the heavens, “each to each with confluent ire.” In her translation, E.B.B. recreated the turbulence of the passage in Greek through elaborate alliteration and assonance in English, and the anaphora accelerates the rapid movement of the speech: “And growls the thunder . . . And glares the lightning. . . . And the whirlwinds . . . And blasts of every wind . . . And air.” The fearful curses that “Jove’s right-hand impelleth hither” are echoed in the language of Prometheus, as a performative utterance that makes words into deeds: we are made to see (“dost thou see?”) that the curse of Zeus against Prometheus has become the curse of Prometheus against Zeus. In her translation, E.B.B. sought to transfer to her own poetic diction the impetuosity of Aeschylean language, which her translator’s Preface described in terms of “vehement imaginativeness, a strong but repressed sensibility, a high tone of morality, a fervency of devotion, and a rolling energetic diction” (6). Yet in dramatizing such verbal violence the words of Prometheus are curiously turned against himself, and herself, as well. In her Preface, E.B.B. admired how “we see him daring and unflinching beneath the torturing and dishonouring ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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hand, yet keenly alive to the torture and dishonour” (9), but in his final speech, this torture seems to originate within Prometheus as the embodiment of sublime rhetoric that is both cause and effect of his own suffering. E.B.B. paraphrased this speech again in her Preface, to emphasize how such suffering is both the cause and the effect of her translation: “And when, at the last he calls no longer upon the sun, and earth, and waters, from whom the Avenger is secluding him; but demands of Aether, who is rolling light to all eyes excepting his, whether he beholds how he suffers by injustice,—our hearts rise up within us, and bear witness that the suffering is indeed unjust” (9). In paraphrasing her own translation, E.B.B. seemed to prescribe as well as inscribe suffering as the only response to the Greek text: when “our hearts rise up within us, and bear witness,” we all suffer the effect of Promethean suffering. Even while we see Prometheus “daring and unflinching” in this torture, we see how the violence of his impetuous language is turned against himself to make him suffer. And we see how E.B.B., like Aeschylus whose language “writhes beneath its impetuosity,” might also suffer as a translator who writes beneath this impetuosity, recreating the language of the sublime in order to turn it against herself. Along with Aeschylus who “felt the force” of his own Prometheus, she was bound to feel it too. The scene with Io seemed to digress from this titanic suffering, as E.B.B. commented in her Preface: “The readers of Aeschylus feel it: they are impatient at Io’s long narrations; not because those narrations are otherwise than beautiful, but because they would hear Prometheus speak again: they are impatient even at Prometheus’s prophetic replies to Io, because they would hear him speak only of Prometheus” (8). The impatience of these imagined readers echoes E.B.B.’s own impatience in an earlier letter she wrote to Boyd, complaining that the vision of Io tortured by a gadfly felt like a drop from the heights of the Promethean sublime: “When a mind, winged by the noble preceding scenes, lights upon the place of the gadfly, there is something comparatively low & terrestrial in its sensations” (BC 2:106). Compared to the divine suffering of Prometheus, the merely mortal agonies of Io, wandering far and wide to encounter monstrous creatures, brought the tragedy down to earth: “it occasions a corresponding change of feeling in the mind of the reader—in which case he must feel, as in all cases of suddenly suspended enthusiasm—that he is fastened to a dead weight. . . . Can you actually attend to geographical descriptions & to one eyed one toothed hags with your head & heart full of Prometheus?” (BC 106–107). Unlike Prometheus weighed down by chains but “keenly alive to the torture,” Io seemed like “a dead weight” weighing down the soul of the original composition, and therefore more difficult for a translator to bring to life. 72

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Nevertheless, Io proves quite an animated figure in E.B.B.’s translation. E.B.B. wrote to Boyd that she had “reconsidered Io,” and found herself “admiring the night visions, the geographical descriptions, & several other passages full of animation & power” (BC 106), and when she translated these passages, she found ways to powerfully animate the figure of Io. Even if E.B.B. felt impatient with the Io episode, it also tested her patience in another sense, requiring the translator to embody another form of suffering more feminine than that of Prometheus. Io enters the translation “wretched and madden’d” with pain: Oh woe! Oh woe! Where are, ye gods, my wand’rings wide directed? Me, in what crime, thou Jove, what crime, detected, Yok’st thou to suffering, so, And thus to goading terror dost thou doom me Wretched and madden’d? Oh, with fire consume me Hide me with earth, to beasts my body fling: Spurn not my prayer, oh king! Too many wandr’ings on my strength have press’d, Nor know I where I shall attain to rest. (37–38) Marked by punctuation, repetition, exclamation, and interruption, the contorted syntax of this speech dramatizes the torture of Io, played out in her language as well as on her body. Not knowing “where are . . . my wand’rings wide directed” and suffering the pressure of “too many wandr’ings on my strength,” her body is shamefully transformed to act out the symptoms of her suffering. Half-girl and half-cow, she is yoked to “suff ’ring so” and doomed to “goading terror,” without being able to identify the source of her pain. Like the performative utterance of Prometheus at the end of the tragedy, her prayer enacts a wish for fire to “consume me” and earth to “hide” me, but in calling for an end to her suffering she only provokes more suffering. This desire for self-destruction (“to beasts my body fling”) is a painful reminder of what has already happened, her own body flung into the form of a beast. In E.B.B.’s translation, Io meets with sympathy from the female chorus, who ask Prometheus: “What saith the hornëd virgin, hearest thou?” E.B.B. also responded with sympathy, in a scholarly footnote to this line. Her translation departed from Blomfield’s edition of the Greek text, which attributed the line to Io and not the chorus. Arguing against Blomfield (and implicitly against Boyd, who preferred Blomfield), E.B.B. maintained, “it certainly does seem to me finer and more characteristic, that Io, hurried on by the vehemence of anguish, ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 73

should appear to have forgotten the presence of Prometheus, than that she should give utterance to anguish, with the mere object of describing it to him” (60). E.B.B. confessed herself unable “to feel the full force of this remark” by Blomfield, and insisted instead on her own, more forceful reading of Io, whose anguish should be inscribed and felt inside the body rather than merely described from the outside. Sympathizing with the female pathos of this passage, E.B.B. aligned herself with the female chorus. E.B.B. also admired, as she admitted to Boyd, “the night visions” that anticipate Io’s sexual seduction by Zeus. In E.E.B.’s translation of this passage, Io describes to the chorus how dreams used to haunt her “virgin chamber” at night: I know not why I should distrust you, nymphs; And all ye fain would learn, will I unfold In clearest speech: albei’t, ev’n in speech, Touching the Jove-impellëd tempesting, And the corruption of my human form, The cause which wing’d them to me, thrills my soul For dreams nocturnal ever ’habiting Within my virgin chamber, me beguiled With honey’d words:—‘Oh, blessed, blessed maid, Wherefore so long unwedded, when ’tis thine To meet with noblest spousals? since for thee Jove is consumed by an arrowy love, And yearns to win thee; maiden, spurn not thou The vows of Jove; but hence to Lerne’s plain, Enrich’d with flocks and ox-stalls of thy sire, That so Saturnius’ eye may quench its love.’ Unhappy me! Each night I was constrain’d By visions thus. (40) Here Io “so long unwedded” is seduced by “honey’d words” into sexual union with a god. In Greek, this scene of seduction is full of erotic violence. Zeus is inflamed with a bolt of desire like his lightning bolt (l. 649: ἱμέρου βέλος), and he wants to have sex with her (l. 650: συναίρεσθαι Κύπριν); Io is commanded not to resist these advances (l. 651: μὴ ’πολακτίσῃς, “do not kick against”) but to go to the deep meadows of Lerna (l. 652–653: πρὸς Λέρνης βαθὺν λειμῶνα), a metaphor for her own virginal body as a place to be penetrated. In English, the sexual seduction is more euphemistically translated: “’tis thine / To meet with noblest spousals,” Io is told. Nevertheless it is clear the sexual desire is not 74

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her own, but forcefully imposed from above: “for thee/ Jove is consumed by an arrowy love / And yearns to win thee” so that his “eye may quench its love.” The violence of eros overpowers Io, who, “constrain’d by visions thus,” is bound to Zeus as object of his desire. “Unhappy me!” she laments, subjected to an unequal marriage of divine power and human suffering. Having witnessed this misery, the chorus commiserates with Io in the choral ode immediately following her exit. Proclaiming the conventional wisdom “that happier far a marriage is, / Our equals form’d among,” they ward off their own fear of unequal unions between powerful gods and powerless girls: “I fear no equal unions. Never may / The eyes of mightiest gods, which I can flee not, / Their love upon me fling! (48–49). The final speech of Io as she exits in a frenzy of pain is translated by E.B.B. into highly eroticized language: Ah me! Ah me! The gangrene and insanity Which striketh to my soul, are burning: The fiery sting is pricking me; My throbbing heart my breast is spurning, And round and round mine eyes are wheeling, And from their course my steps are reeling, By frenzy’s blast impell’d to motion: My tongue is all without a chain, And beat my turbid words in vain ’Gainst dreary Atè’s ocean. (48) The torture of Prometheus has its feminine counterpart in this speech, which performs both in word and in deed the suffering of Io as it is happening. Io is suspended in a series of present participles (“burning,” “pricking,” “throbbing,” “spurning,” “wheeling,” “reeling”) that dramatize the madness descending on her, the “insanity / Which striketh to my soul” at the beginning of the speech, and “dreary Atè” at the end. It is significant that E.B.B.’s translation of Io’s madness ends with Atè, a Greek word transcribed but not translated into English. This recalls the poem she dedicated to Boyd, recalling “that deed of Atè / Which you bound me to so fast / Reading ‘De Virginitate’ / From the first line to the last.” While referring to Atè in “Epistulae de Virginitate,” it is also the Greek word for the madness of Io, suggesting a very different story about virginity: in reading Prometheus Bound, E.B.B. was bound to discover these Greek letters in Io, turning her translation into a deed of Atè that also resisted translation. Indeed, her translator’s Preface ended ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 75

with an allusion to Io in the final paragraph: “Forgive my English for not being Greek, and myself for not being Aeschylus. And will Aeschylus forgive, among my many other offences against him, the grace of offense of profaning his Prometheus, by attaching to it some miscellaneous poems by its translator? Will he not rather retort upon me, his chorus’s strongly expressed disapprobation of unequal unions? And how can I defend myself?” E.B.B. asked (11), concluding with phrase in Greek: ἀπόλεμος ὅδε γ’ ὁ πόλεμος “a war that is not a war.” Recalling how Io suffered an unequal union with Zeus, E.B.B. presented her own suffering in relation to Aeschylus: as a translator and a poet she was overmastered by his poetry, fighting a war she could not win because it cannot be won. The only way to continue translating was to subject herself to ancient Greek, a dead language that would always have the last word, in letters that could not be translated. And yet E.B.B. did continue writing in English, as she published her own poetry together with her translation: Prometheus Bound, Translated from the Greek of Aeschylus, with Miscellaneous Poems by the Translator. The anonymous and miscellaneous poems following her translation can be read as an epilogue to Aeschylus, adding to his Greek words more words of her own in English. Immediately following the tragedy, for example, E.B.B. included “The Tempest: A Fragment” as a narrative poem that revisits the scene of translating Greek by staging a (melo)dramatic encounter with the Aeschylean sublime. Reiterating the stormy rhetoric of Prometheus, the poem describes a storm that reveals (in a flash of lightning) a dead man’s face that proves horrifyingly familiar. It is a moment of self-recognition: “So with mine heart: / For there had battled in her solitudes, / Contrary spirits: sympathy with power / And stooping unto power:—the energy / And passiveness—the thunder and the death!” (lines 113–117). Recent critics have read this poem autobiographically or allegorically as a reflection of E.B.B.’s anxiety of authorship; according to Angela Leighton, it dramatizes “a strangely literal threat in the desire for creative power.”21 But the poem is also a reflection of, and on, the process of translating Prometheus Bound. What Leighton calls “a starkly literal confrontation” with the disfigured corpse is a figure for the literality of the text that E.B.B. has translated from Greek into English, without quite bringing it to life: it is the afterlife of Prometheus in translation, a moment when (as E.B.B. wrote in the translator’s Preface) “we may recognize the dead, together with much of the living letter; a literal version, together with a transfusion of poetical spirit.” Indeed, we may recognize all the poems in this volume as transfusions of poetical spirit produced by E.B.B.’s “literal version” of Prometheus Bound. But if E.B.B. began her poetic career making a claim to female authorship mediated by translation, years later she also made a disclaimer about Greek 76

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as a dead end for women writers. She wrote in a letter from 1845 that “the mere fashion of scholarship among women wd. be a disagreeable vain thing, and worse than vain,” because “the Greek language is not to be learnt in a flash of lightning.” Looking back on her own study of Greek, she worried that it “swallows up year after year of studious life,” and concluded: “There is no exercise of the mind so little profitable to the mind as the study of languages. It is the nearest thing to a passive recipiency . . . is it not? . . . as a mental action—though it leaves one weary as ennui itself. Women want to be made to think actively” (BC 10:222). In retrospect her translation of Aeschylus seemed another exercise in “passive recipiency,” in which the suffering translator performed her own subjection to a dead language. The fiction of learning Greek “in a flash of lightning,” like the deadly scene of translating Greek dramatized in “The Tempest,” turned sympathy with power into stooping unto power, thus transforming energy into passiveness and making the translator suffer both “the thunder and the death!” The problem, as E.B.B. came to see it, was her desire to produce a literal translation of Aeschylus. In trying to translate the tragedy “so unparaphrastically” for Boyd during two weeks in 1832, she had translated too literally. When her first version of Prometheus Bound was published in 1833, she compared it to a translation published by Thomas Medwin one year earlier, and fretted: “My translation is very literal. Is it stiff? Does it sound very much indeed like translated poetry, which is no poetry at all? And are the miscellaneous poems worth anything or nothing? I know that Captain Medwin is an awful rival; but I am more literal than he is, who is farther from Aeschylus” (BC 3:78). Being “more literal than he is” seemed both the strength and the weakness of her translation, which was reviewed in the press as a “feminine” performance precisely because of its literalism. The Gentlemen’s Magazine, for example, offered praise that was explicitly gendered: If more young ladies would turn from the living languages to the dead, and especially to Greek, the only perfect medium of thought ever invented by man, they would not only add greatly to their stock of intellectual amusements, but also benefit the other sex, by compelling them to aim at a higher standard of merit. . . . By comparing this version with the original, it will be seen that our author has, to use her own words, “kept as closely to the sense, as was poetically possible”; and so little, indeed, has she swerved, not only here, but through the whole play, from her purposes, that every reader of the Prometheus who wants a crib-book, would do well to bind up this translation with the Greek text, in lieu of the literal ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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prose Latin or English versions usually put into the hands of their pupils by the teachers of the March-of-Intellect era.22 By comparing E.B.B.’s translation to a crib, this reviewer suggested it should be read word by word alongside the Greek text of Aeschylus. It could serve better than “literal prose” as an aid to pupils, and as an example to other young ladies who were learning the language. But the suggestion to “bind up this translation with the Greek text” also implied that E.B.B.’s Prometheus Bound remained more bound to the original than a free imitation. Putting it into the hands of pupils was an underhanded compliment, as if this literal version was not quite literary enough to stand on its own. This implicit criticism became more explicit in an American review of E.B.B., ten years later, as she was increasingly read and valued for her own poetry. The American reviewer found the translation “not very successful” because of its dependence on the Greek text. In contrast to the feminine poetry of her translation, her translator’s Preface seemed more manly: “We like her preface much better than the work it introduced,” the reviewer added, “because it was “written in vigorous and manly prose” with “a good deal of masculine learning, if the ladies will pardon the expression.”23 In addition to staking a claim to “masculine learning,” the Preface had made a vigorous argument for the originality of translation, which according to E.B.B. “should not be servilely imitative of any former age.” The seemingly masculine rhetoric of rebellion in the Preface contradicted the seemingly feminine rhetoric of suffering in the translation itself, making E.B.B.’s Prometheus Bound seem like a contradictory performance of Ladies’ Greek. Even E.B.B. herself, looking back in 1842 on her translation, considered it a servile imitation, “rather close to the letter . . . a Prometheus twice bound” (BC 5:26). She criticized her own Prometheus for being too closely bound to the Greek text, too dependent and imitative, and therefore not original poetry in its own right. Repeatedly, she confessed a sense of shame about publishing this failure: “It is not scholastically that I am so ashamed of it . . . but poetically. It is correct as far as the letter goes” (BC 5:224), but “it is an immature & imperfect work, & written when I was less capable of writing than I am now, & under hurried & unfavorable circumstances. It appears to me now, if faithful to the letter of Aeschylus, a rebel to his spirit—nay, too cold & stiff & weak to be a noble rebel in an effectual sense. . . . May it perish!” (BC 7:260). In her youthful attempt to embody Greek letters as literally as possible, she had created a corpse that she pronounced dead on arrival: “It is legitimately qualified to be used as a cramming book by young students,” she agreed with the critics, but 78

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“for the rest, dead, & prostrate, stiff & cold . . . ‘corps morte’ in a full sense” (BC 10:249). In 1845 E.B.B. therefore set out to retranslate Prometheus Bound, creating a more “free” version to release the translator from her shameful suffering. In a letter to Robert Browning, she described the misery of her 1833 translation: “Some years ago, I translated or rather undid into English, the Prometheus of Aeschylus. To speak of this production moderately (not modestly) it is the most miserable of all miserable versions of the class. It was completed (in the first place) in thirteen days—the iambics thrown into blank verse, the lyrics into rhymed octosyllabics & the like—and the whole together, as cold as Caucasus & as flat as the nearest plain. . . . And so I resolved to wash away the transgression, and translate the tragedy over again” (BC 10:102). Casting Browning in a role reminiscent of Mr. Boyd, she asked him for critical commentary on her revision, and was surprised to receive seven and a half pages of detailed grammatical notes. “I feel more than half ashamed of it & of me for using your time so,” she apologized to him, “Because, you see, it is not the mere reading of the MS but the ‘comparing’ of the text & the melancholy comparisons between the English & the Greek” (BC 10:252). But in the course of their correspondence, as E.B.B. was revising Prometheus Bound, the two poets translated the text of Aeschylus into the context of their courtship, transforming such “melancholy comparisons” into a medium of erotic exchange.24 Quoting lines from Aeschylus back and forth in Greek, they reinterpreted the tragedy into a comedy of love where each claimed to be “bound” to the other. “I feel it delicious to be free when most bound to you, Ba,” Browning wrote to E.B.B., relishing “all the liberty of the implied subjection” (BC 12), and she played along in this intertextual game, threatening to “chain you  .  .  . (as you wish to be chained), chain you, rivet you—do you feel how the fine little chain twists round & round you? Do you hear the stroke of the riveting?—& you may feel that too. Now it is done—now, you are chained—Βία has finished the work . . I , Ba!—(observe the anagram!)” (BC 12:132). Playfully casting herself in the role of Bia (the allegorical figure of “Force,” who binds Prometheus to the rock), she inserted an iota into her own nickname (“Ba”), asking Browning to observe the binding of his body as well as her own forceful embodiment of Greek letters: “I, Ba!” like the “I” of Io. Along with repeated references to Prometheus (including Browning’s suggestion that they write Prometheus Unbound together as a sequel to Prometheus Bound, but she demurred), Io was also a recurring figure in the courtship correspondence. In her third letter to Browning, E.B.B. introduced the mournful story of Io: “When Prometheus had recounted a long list of sorrows to be ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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endured by Io, & declared at last that he was μηδέπω ᾽ν προοιμίοις, poor Io burst out crying” (BC 10:53). Here she contrasted the words of Prometheus (“not yet in the proem” of his tale of Io’s wandering) with the words of Browning, who was just in the prelude of his own poetic career and (as it turned out) the happier story of their courtship. And in the final months of the correspondence, Browning recalled this early reference to Io: “Let all I have done be the prelude and the real work begin—I felt it would be so before, and told you at the very beginning—do you remember? And you spoke of Io ‘in the proem.” How much more should follow now!” (BC 12:70). He also jokingly compared E.B.B. to Io—“now, Ba—Ba is suddenly Ιω πλανωμένη” (BC 12:215)—turning the long-suffering Io into a figure no longer mad with misery but madly in love. In this continual recontextualization of quotations from Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound was liberated from “literal” translation and freely retranslated in their exchange of letters, even if E.B.B. could not quite envision Prometheus unbound. As various critics have narrated the story of the Brownings, the two poets rewrote the Promethean plot as a script for the drama of their own lives: rebelling against E.B.B.’s tyrannical father, they married and eloped to Italy.25 From there, as devoted husband and editor for E.B.B., Browning made sure that the revised translation of Aeschylus (including the translator’s Preface, but not the scholarly notes) was bound together with more recent verse for her 1850 Poems. Thus, nearly two decades after her first book of poetry had been presented to the public as an anonymous epilogue to Aeschylus, Aeschylus was re-presented as a prologue to the poetry of E.B.B., now a well-known name. Whereas the poems of 1833 referred back to Aeschylus to reflect on his afterlife in translation, many of the poems collected in 1850 were reprinted from other publications and already had a life of their own, independent of Aeschylus. And the second translation of Prometheus Bound was closer to E.B.B.’s mature poetic idiom, with more deft variation in lyric meters for the choral odes, and narrative passages written in flowing blank verse that anticipated the poetic cadences of her new epic poem in progress, Aurora Leigh (1856). For example, not long after his marriage to E.B.B., Browning copied out this passage from her revised translation in his own hand: For evermore Around my virgin-chamber, wandering went The nightly visions which entreated me With syllabled smooth sweetness. ‘Blessed maid, Why lengthen out thy maiden hours when fate 80

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Permits the noblest spousal in the world? When Zeus burns with the arrow of thy love And fain would touch thy beauty? Maiden, thou Despise not Zeus!’ . . . Such dreams did all night long Constrain me.26 In comparison to E.B.B.’s earlier translation of this passage, the language here tends toward smoother paraphrase, turning “honey’d words” (1833) into “syllabled smooth sweetness” (1850). The awkward phrasing of “dreams nocturnal ever ’habiting / Within my virgin chamber” (1833) is also smoothed out into “For evermore / Around my virgin-chamber, wandering went / The nightly visions” (1850), and rather than ending the passage with “Each night I was constrain’d / By visions thus” (1830), the passive construction is made into an active verb, poetically placed after the enjambment: “Such dreams did all night long / Constrain me.” The seduction of Io by Zeus is more explicitly erotic: in contrast to “Jove is consumed by an arrowy love, / And yearns to win thee” (1830), the revision introduces the language of physical sensation, as “Zeus burns with the arrow of thy love / And fain would touch thy beauty.” Browning’s interest in this passage—touching its beauty by copying it out in his own hand—suggests another way of identifying E.B.B. with Io, releasing the long-suffering translator from her 1833 translation into the seductive pleasures of her “free” translation. Yet it remains open to question whether the “paraphrastic” translation of 1850 is any more or less “free” than translating “unparaphrastically.” The 1850 version claims a different kind of literalism in comparison to the 1833 version, as the substitution of “Zeus” (1850) for “Jove” (1833) brings the reader closer to Aeschylus, and E.B.B. follows more closely the Greek word order in certain turns of phrase as well.27 Even while distancing herself from the first version of Prometheus Bound, E.B.B. was not abandoning literal translation as much as re-enacting a relation to Greek letters that she had encountered in translating the text of Aeschylus. When she confessed to Browning that she “translated or rather undid into English, the Prometheus of Aeschylus,” and resolved to do it over, she became entangled yet again in the process of doing and undoing Greek, thus repeating the translator’s bondage. In different ways, both translations played out her ongoing identification with Greek letters, inscribed on the body of her own writing. Just a few years later, Aurora Leigh was published as an epic poem about a woman writer—a generic figure, not E.B.B. herself yet not not herself—who also identifies with Greek. Classical literacy defines Aurora as a Woman of Letters, who has learned “the trick of Greek” from her father (1:714) and begins ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 81

writing poetry by imitating classical verse: “I poured myself / Along the veins of others, and achieved / Mere lifeless imitations of live verse, / And made the living answer for the dead” (1:972–975). Indeed Aurora describes her soul as a palimpsest inscribed with dead Greek letters: Let who says ‘The soul’s a clean white paper,’ rather say, A palimpsest, a prophet’s holograph Defiled, erased and covered by a monk’s,— The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps Some fair, fine trace of what was written once, Some upstroke of an alpha and omega Expressing the old scripture. (1:824–832) This remarkable passage imagines the soul not as a tabula rasa or “clean white paper,” but as a surface already marked with many layers of Greek texts, sacred and secular, biblical and classical: the holy script of a prophet underneath the writing of a scribe, the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine underneath the pastoral romances of Longus. Although the layers of this palimpsest are “defiled, erased, and covered” by ever more writing, it is possible for a reader “poring on” these letters to enter a long, slow process of revelation. For Aurora this scene of reading is apocalyptic in the etymological sense (from the Greek απο and καλυπτω), revealing the hidden letters of an “obscene text” that is not quite seen, and never completely legible. At best, “perhaps” we may learn to see “some fair, fine trace of what was written once,” and even these traces remain difficult to decipher, “some upstroke of an alpha and omega.” The palimpsest both invites and resists reading; like the soul it figures, it can only be spelled out in an archaic alphabet from an archaic language, “expressing the old scripture” without saying what it means or how it should be translated. The palimpsestic inscription of the Greek alphabet on Aurora’s soul is like the grammata written by Prometheus on the tablet of Io’s memory, and transcribed, translated, and transformed by E.B.B. into an idea(l) of pure literality that might (ideally) reveal the letter in the spirit and the spirit in the letter. Aurora is the fictional embodiment of female classical literacy that E.B.B. cultivated throughout the story of her own literary career as it unfolded before, within, and beyond Aurora Leigh.28 And so, in her epic quest to discover “Truth, so far, in my book,” Aurora identifies with the “I” of the wandering Io: “I, Aurora, still / Have felt it hound me through the wastes of life / As Jove did 82

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Io” (VII 827–830). And so also, somewhere between alpha and omega, between the A of Aurora and the Ω of Io, we may discern “perhaps” the I of E.B.B., having wandered through several versions of Prometheus Bound to make her name as a translator, and then writing Aurora Leigh as yet another attempt to put “Greek verbs in me,” not to make a final claim to linguistic mastery or authorial subjectivity through translation from Greek, but to discover yet again a form of female authorship subjected to and imprinted by a strange alphabet.

A Goodly Company of Lady-Translators In the course of her life (1806–1861), E.B.B. proved herself an exemplary Woman of (Greek) Letters in Victorian England, but she was not the only example. Self-taught in Greek, other women of her generation were also reading and translating Aeschylus on a wide spectrum of literary production, as a solitary exercise or for private circulation, and increasingly for publication. On one end of the spectrum was Sara Coleridge (1802–1852), whose notebook (as we have seen) included a fragmentary translation of Aeschylus that was never finished and never published; on the other end of the spectrum was Anna Swanwick (1813–1899), whose translations of the entire Aeschylean corpus were published in a decorative edition with plate illustrations from Flaxman. Among the next generation was Augusta Webster (1837–1894), whose translation of Prometheus Bound was reviewed in 1866 by The Athenaeum: “For a lady to translate Aeschylus is no longer a strange phenomenon. Mrs. Browning made two versions of this very play, the Prometheus; one for her private friends, one for the public. Miss Swanwick has published within the last few months an entire translation of the Oresteia trilogy. Mrs. Webster had, perhaps, the advantage of both her lady predecessors, as well as of most of the translators of the other sex, in closeness and simplicity, combined with literary skill.”29 Reviewing several new translations of Aeschylus, The Contemporary Review also greeted Webster as the likely successor to E.B.B.: “We welcome her to the goodly company of lady-translators.”30 Other reviewers were less confident that any living poet could measure up to E.B.B., in the wake of her death in 1861. In Our Living Poets (1871), H. Buxton Forman wrote about Webster: The present version of the Prometheus, equally with all other new versions, must of course be compared with Mrs. Browning’s magnificent rendering of that magnificent work; and Mrs. Webster’s falls no less short of Mrs. Browning’s than do all other English presentations of the mighty ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 83

conception of Aeschylus. Mrs. Webster’s literality is doubtless useful, but literality of word is a matter of small account as compared with essential faithfulness and large beauty; and it does not seem necessary to give more than one extract from each of the versions to show how futile has been the attempt to superseded Mrs. Browning’s—if indeed such was the aim of the more recent version; and it is not easy to know what is the aim of retranslating a foreign work unless it be to supersede former translations.31 But in making a claim to “literality,” the aim of Mrs. Webster and her company of lady-translators may not have been to “supersede former translations” of Aeschylus, but to transform the seemingly exceptional performance of Ladies’ Greek into a collective performance of female classical literacy. At a time when women played an increasingly important role in the transmission of literary culture, they used translation to engage in mediated forms of authorship that would send their literary productions into broad circulation, without necessarily assuming more authority as scholars or greater originality as poets. In surveying literary translations by women in the nineteenth century, Susanne Stark observes that “the ambivalence inherent in the process of translation, its simultaneous derivativeness and originality, was particularly significant for female translators”; vacillating between “self-effacement” and “self-assertion,” they turned the process of translating into a highly self-conscious act of mediation that presented new possibilities for women to write.32 Lorna Hardwick also argues that translation was empowering to women: taking as her examples versions of Prometheus Bound by E.B.B., Anna Swanwick, and Augusta Webster, she concludes that “each demonstrated different kinds of empowerment based on the increasing diversity of translational practices.”33 What Hardwick calls “empowerment,” however, was less an assertion of individual agency than a complex dynamic of entanglement in larger institutional and cultural formations that these women helped to reform even as they were also formed by them. It was precisely because female literary character was defined by subjection to linguistic discipline—through classical education at home, and later in the women’s colleges—that “lady-translators” could make an important contribution to nineteenth-century debates about translation. By translating Prometheus Bound, again and again, they could play out questions about classical literacy that depended less on the authorial power of the translator, and more on the generic and collective category of the Woman of Letters as a powerful medium for classical transmission. Augusta Webster participated actively in England’s periodical culture at a time when classical translations were reviewed and revered and reviled with 84

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increasing intensity. Writing about translation was perhaps even more important than the process of translating itself: the theory and the practice were inextricably intertwined, despite and because of their contradictions. In her essays for The Examiner, later collected in A Housewife’s Opinions, Webster had strong opinions about “literalism” in translation as a recurring question for critical debate. She began her essay, “The Translation of Poetry,” with the assertion that “it is customary to talk of translation as a process to be conducted according to one of two opposing theories,” with the translator resolving “whether he will reproduce by the letter or by the spirit.” The question he (and increasingly, she) must address is, “will he measure word by word to the original, or will he reconceive the thoughts from the original . . . like that of transmigrated souls?” But the essay immediately goes on to interrogate this opposition: “But has he really a choice between letter and spirit. . . . But can you have the spirit of a poet’s work without the letter?”34 According to Webster, “the translator’s true work is to give us, so nearly as the respective grammars and idiomatic constructions of his divers tongues may allow, the translated author’s thoughts as he himself gave them and to trust to accuracy to the letter for accuracy to the spirit” (64). She concluded her essay by invoking as her ideal the translation of the Hebrew bible, “done by a company—a company seeking no personal glory,” but working together with “entire disinterestedness” and collective faith in the letter: “the spirit, they thought, was there of itself, if they were but faithful to the dictionary” (65). However impossible such a translation might be, Webster subscribed to the letter as the utopian horizon to which all translators must aspire, where the letter and the spirit are one. Yet no single translation could produce pure literality, since in Webster’s opinion the exercise of individual authorship by the translator would inevitably break faith with the letter and deviate into an idiosyncratic idiom. In her next essay on translation, “A Transcript and a Transcription,” she criticized two versions of Aeschylus for their idiosyncrasies, albeit for opposite reasons, as one sacrificed the spirit for the letter and the other sacrificed the letter for the spirit. One extreme was exemplified by E.D.A. Morshead, “an aspirant who turns aside to follow the flights of his own fancy . . . and adds himself to Aeschylus” (66). His “transcription” was “non-literal” and therefore “not Aeschylus,” according to Webster: “The spirit is gone—this very merit aimed at by free and expanding translations, that of preserving the higher thing, the spirit, at the expense of the lower thing, the letter, is just what oftenest does go” (67). The other extreme was exemplified by Robert Browning, who aspired “to be literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language,” as he wrote in the preface for his (in)famous Agamemnon translation. But if at first Webster seemed to endorse ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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the literalism of his “transcript” of Aeschylus, she finally concluded that “Mr. Browning’s method of translation is a sort of literalness which we cannot but consider . . . mistranslation” (77). She ended her review with a familiar quip, that “we could wish nothing better for literature than that Mr. Browning, having translated the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, should go on to translate the Agamemnon of Robert Browning” (79). Between the “transcription” and the “transcript,” between too much of the spirit and too much of the letter, Webster tried to embody her own theory of “literal” translation. In a show of solidarity with other lady-translators, she praised “the lucid Miss Swanwick” (69) because she produced “readable English” in an “excellently poetical as well as careful version” (71). Following E.B.B., both Webster and Swanwick were aligned with an increasing emphasis on literalism in the course of the century, but as Matthew Reynolds points out in his survey of nineteenth-century norms and principles of translation, “All this advocacy of ‘literalness” concealed—and indeed relied on—differences as to what the word precisely meant. . . . Then as now, no one meant the word ‘literal’ literally: a letter-for-letter translation would not be in language but in code. Even when ‘literal’ was allowed the latitude of meaning ‘word-for-word’ and even when the question of verse form had been fudged, further qualifications were required.”35 While the company of lady-translators might have shared a collective faith in the letter of Aeschylus (like translation of the Hebrew bible “done by a company seeking no personal glory”), each translator had to differentiate and further qualify what she meant by “literalism” in translation, and each version of Prometheus Bound was “literal” in a different sense from other versions. The complete title of Augusta Webster’s version was The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, Literally Translated into English Verse by Augusta Webster, Edited by Thomas Webster, M.A., Late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In the Editor’s Preface, her husband explained that “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 he went on to give it his seal of approval: “I have most carefully compared this translation, line by line, with the original, and am not afraid to vouch for its conscientious adherence to the letter of the text.” A second prefatory note, presumably supplied by Webster herself, further guaranteed a conscientious adherence to the letter by identifying that “the text upon which this translation is based is that of Paley (2nd English edition, 1861),” and supplying notes at the end of the translation to identify even more conscientiously the few “passages in which the text departs from that of Paley.” Furthermore, the English translation had numbers in brackets that corresponded to Greek lines in Paley’s 86

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edition, with the implication that the reader would be as conscientious as the translator in comparing the English to the Greek. Thus the paratext of Webster’s translation was self-consciously constructed to represent its “conscientious adherence to the letter of the text,” not so much letter-by-letter or word-by-word but line-by-line. Consider for example page 36 of Webster’s translation, enumerating the gifts of Prometheus to mankind. Before learning to read and write, human beings lived a disorderly existence without clear signs: Nor had they certain signs Either of winter or of flowery spring Or fruitful summer, but in all they did Were without rule, until I shewed the risings And the perplexing settings of the stars. 475 (466) And the chief among inventions, numbers, too I found them, and the art of joining letters, Handmaid of universal memory, And mother of all learning. Like Prometheus teaching the interpretation of signs, including numbers and letters, Webster’s translation taught the reader how to read the English in relation to Greek: indeed, the art of joining letters was joined to numbers by Webster, as line 475 in her English text was marked to correspond to line (466) in the Greek text. This numerical notation served as a representation of classical scholarship for readers who could read Greek, and even if they could not: the accuracy of the line numbers guaranteed the accuracy of the translation, regardless of whether the English reader referred back to the Greek text of Aeschylus. By choosing to translate Prometheus Bound as a play for the performance of classical literacy, Webster therefore emphasized the pedagogical function of her translation. This pedagogical function was implicitly gendered as well, especially in this passage, where the ability to read and write Greek letters was represented as “handmaid of universal memory” and “mother of all learning.” So also Webster seemed to serve as “handmaid” for the transmission of the Greek text and as “mother” for its reproduction in English. Her translation was part of a broader educational agenda pursued by Webster, who encouraged all learning and learning for all: in the following decades, she served twice on the London School Board and supported the admission of women to university degrees. The popularity of Swanwick’s Aeschylean translations made the gendering of classical transmission even more explicit. While “Mrs. Webster” assumed some ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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access to classical scholarship (guaranteed by the elite affiliation of her husband on the title page, “Thomas Webster, M.A., Late Fellow of Cambridge University”), “Miss Swanwick” created more accessibility. Already famous for her translation of Goethe’s Faust, Swanwick published a translation of the Oresteia in 1865 that was widely praised by the London literary establishment, including a review in The Athenaeum: “The translation is characterized by the same force of language and freedom of style as that from the German. It is a no less faithful rendering of the spirit and general drift of the original, the choruses being in rhymed metre, and the rest in blank heroic verse.”36 While the combination of freedom and fidelity was a common criterion for evaluating all translators, Swanwick seemed to embody the special ability of women to perform a “faithful rendering of the spirit” without violating the letter. The rhetorical conventions for reviewing nineteenth-century translations overlapped with the equally conventional rhetoric of Victorian womanhood, in order to represent female translators as more faithful, chaste, and pure than their male counterparts. For example, The Westminster Quarterly published an essay in 1865 entitled “The Capacities of Women,” that included a rapturous review of Swanwick, “beyond a doubt, our most accomplished female translator” whose translation of Aeschylus “achieved a high credit, not for herself only, but for her sex.”37 To demonstrate that her translation is “beyond comparison more faithful to the original,” the reviewer compared Swanwick’s Oresteia to a recent translation by Professor Blackie, and concluded, “the lady need not fear comparison with the Greek professor” (p. 364). Perhaps even more than the scholarly accuracy and poetic qualities of her translation, Swanwick was praised for her general introduction to the Oresteia, where she cited “such authorities as Welcker, and Max Müller, men of genius” but also revealed “at once a hearty enthusiasm and an independent judgment.” Taking Aeschylus to heart, Swanwick had incorporated a popular idea of classics that could prove “the moral uses of Poetry and Art as national educators,” and improve the popular theater houses which (according to the reviewer) “ought to be great schools of virtue and intellect.” Indeed, Swanwick’s translation prompted this reviewer to envision “the future (oh, might it be a near future!)” when “it will be a profession, for women as well as men, to read aloud to large companies, and also to definite classes of pupils, select literature and select Poetry, with correct and melodious execution, mental improvement, and the imbibing of noble sentiment being the ends definitely proposed” (p. 367–368). As a professional translator, Swanwick might surpass professors of Greek in providing a broader moral and aesthetic education for the English people, showing by her example that “the age . . . is able to develop higher expressions of itself, and is equally bound to do so” (p. 368). 88

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And so eight years after the publication of her Oresteia, Swanwick translated Prometheus Bound for inclusion in Dramas of Aeschylus in 1873. In translating Prometheus for a popular audience, she too was “equally bound” to help the age develop higher expressions of itself. Her introduction to the tragedy emphasized a progressive reading of Aeschylus: placing Prometheus Bound within the larger context of a lost Promethean trilogy, she explained that the opposition between Prometheus and Zeus “set forth the relation between the finite and the supreme will, in their antagonism and reconciliation,” and she insisted that, in the final play of the trilogy, “if we possessed it we should see the majesty of Zeus fully vindicated, and reconciliation established between the contending powers.” Swanwick therefore seemed less sympathetic to the rebellious Prometheus, and more inclined to see his self-inflicted suffering as a necessary part of his education toward a more harmonious political order. In the very etymology of his name, she traced a similar progression: “from the Sancrit word Pramantha, the instrument used for kindling fire” and the root “pramatha, signifying theft,” to the Greek verb “manthano, to learn; that is to say, to appropriate knowledge; whence prometheia, foreknowledge, forethought,” she showed how the Promethean myth was invested “with new and more spiritual significance when transplanted to the soil of Hellas” (158). This moralizing etymology was itself a kind of translation, translating the Promethean myth of progress to the soil of England and investing it with even more spiritual significance. Swanwick’s contemporaries admired this progressive reading of Aeschylus, whose civic ideology could serve as pedagogical model for the improvement of English national culture. Gladstone himself congratulated Swanwick, and she became a public figure who “received invitations from many distinguished men of letters.”38 She also befriended Robert Browning after sending her complete Dramas of Aeschylus to him with a personal letter: “I can hardly hope that my translation of the great Athenian can have much interest for one so familiar with the original as yourself. I am therefore pleased that my version should be accompanied by the noble Illustrations of Flaxman, whose highest praise is that he has worthily interpreted the conceptions of Aeschylus.” When Browning later sent an inscribed copy of his Agamemnon translation to Swanwick, she replied: “I entirely agree with you that absolute fidelity to the original is a prime requirement in a translator.”39 Browning seems to have associated her with E.B.B., as Swanwick recalled a conversation at dinner when “he turned to me quietly and said, “I wish you had known her—it was something to have lived with such a woman for sixteen years,” and this anecdote was embellished by Katherine Bradley: “I went to see my vivid old damask rose, ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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Miss Swanwick. . . . She told me how, once at dinner, he said to her, I wish you could have known her,” thus “choosing this sublime old maid, for this deep confidence of his nuptial life.”40 But in both the politics and the poetics of her translation, Swanwick departed from E.B.B.’s Prometheus Bound. Rather than amplifying the suffering of Prometheus, she emphasized his rhetoric of rebellion, and she read Io along similar lines: “She, like the Titan, resisted the divine will, and, like him, must suffer the penalty of her rebellion,” Swanwick wrote in her introduction to the play. While conceding that “the account of her sufferings, as, wailing and distraught, she pursues her toilsome wanderings, serves to heighten the impression of the cruel tyranny of Zeus, which it is the object of that drama to produce,” she hastened to add that in another play of Aeschylus, “Zeus appears in relation to Io, not as the obdurate tyrant but as the beneficent deity, whose severest judgments issue in blessings to the individual and to mankind.”41 More interested in redeeming than in dramatizing the suffering of Io, Swanwick emphasized Io’s eventual reconciliation with a kinder, gentler Zeus. In Swanwick’s translation, the nightly visions that haunt Io therefore seem less terrifying. Compared to E.B.B.’s translation of this passage (copied out by Browning himself, not long after his marriage), Swanwick’s language is more soothing: So in clear word all ye desire to know That shall ye hear:—yet am I shamed to tell Wherefore on me, forlorn one, burst the storm Heaven-sent and whence this form’s disfigurement. For evermore would nightly visions haunt My virgin chambers, gently urging me With soothing words;—“O damsel, highly blest, Why longer live in maidenhood when thee Wait loftiest nuptials? For by passion’s dart Inflamed is Zeus for thee and fain would share The yoke of Kypris. Spurn not thou, O child, The couch of Zeus, but to the grassy mead Of Lerna hie thee, to thy father’s herds And cattle-stalls, that so the eye of Zeus From longing may find respite.” By such dreams From night to night still was I visited, Unhappy one; till, taking heart at length, My night-born visions to my sire I told. (p.188) 90

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2.1 John Flaxman, Illustration of Io: “For ever more would nightly visions haunt / My virgin chambers, gently urging me / With soothing words.” Engraved by Thomas Piroli and reproduced in The Dramas of Aeschylus, translated by Anna Swanwick with thirty-three illustrations from Flaxman’s designs (London: Bell & Daldy, 1873), 34–35. Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.

In contrast to E.B.B’s Io “constrained” by a stronger force of violence, Swanwick’s Io hears a voice “gently urging me /with soothing words,” and she is “visited” by visions that promise a happier union with Zeus in the long run: although the god is now “inflamed,” Io is “highly blest” because the “loftiest nuptials” await Io to redeem her suffering. This vision corresponds more closely to the idealized, aestheticized image of Io in an illustration by Flaxman (Figure 2.1). Flaxman’s dreamy Io appeared with three lines from Swanwick’s translation as its caption (“For evermore would nightly visions haunt my virgin chambers, gently urging me with soothing words”). Not yet transformed into a cow, Io reclines seminude with the glimmer of a smile and her eyes closed, dreaming pleasant dreams that assume the form of nymphs like herself: a very pleasing figure for Ladies’ Greek, where the dream of Io has repressed “the form’s disfigurement” that awaits her in the future. Into this idealized figure inspired by Greek visions we might also read the figure of Swanwick, inspired by Aeschylus to create an idealized vision of Greek. Along with the public and private tributes she received for her Greek translations came a letter that made it sound as if Miss Swanwick herself, the aging spinster, had entered into “loftiest nuptials” with the divine Aeschylus: “How blest indeed ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 91

you are to have lived to finish such a consummate work! To have been the daily friend of the most majestic poet-prophet of the ancient world, through year after year, until his very spirit, thought, and power of expression, have filled you with their inspiring influence, has been an ennobling privilege, in contrast with which literary fame is trifling.”42 Her “consummate” translation seemed the consummation of a divine union with “the most majestic poet-prophet,” whose “very spirit” filled Swanwick with “inspiring influence.” In the popular imagination, Miss Swanwick had joined herself with the Greek tragedian in order to embody both the spirit and the letter in translating Aeschylus: an act of faith, indeed. For both Webster and Swanwick, the translation of Prometheus Bound was part of a broader pedagogical and philanthropic mission. By proving that women could translate Greek, perhaps even more “faithfully” than their male counterparts, they also sought to improve Victorian culture. As social reformers they were active in a wide range of charities and causes, including women’s suffrage and the higher education of women: Webster served twice on the London School Board and supported the admission of women to university degrees, and Swanwick signed John Stuart Mill’s petition to parliament for the political enfranchisement of women. Swanwick also participated in the foundation of Bedford College for Women, supported the opening of classes for women at Queen’s College and King’s College, and contributed to the formation of Girton College at Cambridge and Somerville College at Oxford. Self-taught in classical languages, these lady-translators witnessed the transition from informal to formal education for women, and made it possible to imagine the institutionalization of Ladies’ Greek. Among the next generation of women to benefit from these educational reforms was Janet Case, who pursued classical studies at Girton from 1881 to 1885, and later followed in the tracks of Webster and Swanwick with a translation of Prometheus Bound in 1903. Case had received high marks in examinations for both parts of the Classical Tripos at Cambridge, although not a B.A.43 The withholding of university degrees for women was a recurring complaint, as in the refrain from a “Prize Song” at Girton College: Come grant me the B, come grant me the A, Come make me your equal without more delay; Then each learned maid who loves Pindar and Π Let her hasten to Girton that standeth on high.44 Much as the young E.B.B. had aspired to be a good linguist as the height of her ambition, Case was one of those learned maids who hastened “to Girton that 92

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standeth on high” to pursue her love for “ Pindar and Π.” But half a century after E.B.B. proclaimed herself “I, Ba!” through identification with Greek, the desire for the B.A. made it possible for women to claim Greek in new ways, as part of a collegiate identity. Despite her love of Greek letters, Case did not make a professional career of philology. After graduating from Girton, she published several scholarly articles on Greek literature, but she remained an amateur, one whose passion for Greek was informed by her passion for politics, and vice versa. Like Webster and Swanwick, her social activism included support for women’s suffrage and higher education for women; in addition to tutoring Greek to private pupils (such as Virginia Woolf), she took an interest in education for the working classes. In contrast to the Swanwick’s Aeschylus, translated into verse in an expensive illustrated edition, Case published her Prometheus Bound as a prose translation in an inexpensive pocket-size edition, part of the popular Temple Dramatist Series, and designed for readers with little or no background in classical languages. With Greek and English text on facing pages (like the new Loeb series), Case’s translation was a Promethean effort to teach the Greek alphabet to the common man and so bring classical literacy to the masses. Her introduction and notes explained the myth of Prometheus, outlined the plot of the play, and described to nonscholars the little that was known about its original dramatic setting, “leaving far more to the imagination than to modern minds seems at first probable or even possible.”45 Appealing to modern readers, she invited them to enter her translation by imagining the theatrical performance of the play and becoming part of its broader audience. Case was especially interested in Prometheus Bound because of its revolutionary politics, liberating men (and by implication, women) from the bonds of tyranny. In 1904, she had published a short article on two lines in the text, speculating about “the development of Zeus” who might be gradually reformed from tyrant into just ruler.46 In a later article on women in Aeschylean tragedy she went on to pursue a more explicitly feminist analysis, emphasizing that “Aeschylus gives his women brains as well as heart.” She praised the chorus of Prometheus Bound because “these free women, gently bred, full of grace and simplicity, the very flower of loyalty and courage . . . are heart and soul with the splendid rebel who suffers for his love to man”; and they “denounce the crude tyranny of Zeus with victory.”47 To denounce the patriarchy of Zeus even more vigorously, the Introduction to her own Prometheus also expressed feminist sympathies with Io, “the cow-horned maid, a fellow-sufferer at the hands of Zeus, driven from land to land by Zeus’ love.”48 ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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Io’s story was told by Case in a page-long footnote (p. 128–129), and her translation of this episode seems especially animated. Distraught and disoriented, Io enters with a series of desperate questions addressed to Prometheus: “What land? What race? Who shall I say is this I see in bonds of rock, stormbeaten? In penance for what sin art thou destroyed? Tell to what part of earth, I, hapless maid, have wandered. Ah, Ah, again some gadfly stings me, unhappy me . . .” (p.73). The decision to render Greek in English prose made this translation seem more literal and more accessible to the common reader, like a “crib.” Yet the prose translation also verged on poetry, conveying the metrical disturbance of the Greek verse by means of a staccato rhythm, in the repetition of “what” and “I” and “ah” and “me.” These rhythmic effects are even more distinctive in Io’s final speech, before she exits: On, onward! Again a spasm and distracting throes of madness burn me and the gadfly’s prick, forged not with fire, strings me; and my heart for fear knocks at my breast; my eyes roll round and round and away from my course I am borne by my frenzy’s raging blast, and gone the mastery of my tongue; and troubled words at random stumble against the waves of baleful doom. (p. 103) To dramatize the tortured Io, her Greek lament (eleleu eleleu, delivered in the meter known as dochmiacs) is translated by Case into an accelerating prose rhythm that shades into anapestic meter. As Io is “borne by my frenzy’s raging blast,” and “troubled words at random stumble against the waves,” both her body and her speech are driven off course, in a translation that repeats in English Io’s painful subjection to the language of suffering. By dramatizing how Io loses “mastery of my tongue,” Case’s translation demonstrated her mastery of Greek. But precisely because she had mastered this dead language, Case was more bound to the Aeschylean text than she may have intended. The scholarly apparatus of her translation, with its juxtaposition of English prose and Greek text, made it look and sound rather antiquarian, proving less popular in its appeal to a broad audience. Nevertheless it was appreciated by some of her contemporaries, who thought that Case had found a balance between literal and free translation that was neither completely bound to Greek nor completely unbound from it: “The translation is both scholarly and graceful, the fruit of careful and loving study of the original, while at the same time it reads easily and does not remind us more than it should of the fact that the mind expressed is Greek, not English.”49 The expression of a Greek mind, impressed on female character, recalls the conclusion reached by Case 94

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herself in writing about women in Aeschylean tragedy: “They have been passed through the fire of renewal and have been transmuted into something that bears his stamp upon it.”50 When her translation of Prometheus Bound went into print, Case also passed through a (Promethean) fire of renewal; like Io inscribed with the words of Prometheus, her own mind had been transmuted into something that bore the stamp of Aeschylus.

The Flight of Io, to America and Back to Greece With Ladies’ Greek emerging on both sides of the Atlantic in the course of the nineteenth century, women of letters turned to translating Prometheus Bound not only in England but also in America. In July of 1878, The Woman’s Journal of Boston reported “a woman reading greek in the woods of maine.” This hot newsflash came from one Miss Mary W. Mitchell (principal of Miss Mitchell’s School for Girls in Massachusetts), who wished to dispel any doubt among “good men in regard to the ability of women to teach Greek.” Contrary to popular opinion, she maintained “there are at the present time at least a dozen lady teachers in Maine and Massachusetts who, unaided by the Boston Latin School and unaided by Harvard College, have attained by the use of their own brains such proficiency in Greek and Latin languages, that either one of them is more likely to fit girls for college, systematically and thoroughly, than the average Harvard graduate.” To prove her point, she recalled “a young woman whom I met, last year, among the pines of Northern Maine,” reading Prometheus Bound to a rapt audience: I doubt if any of those sojourners for a summer, who listened with me, as we sat around the camp-fire one evening in August, while she translated from the Greek that wonderful creation of Aeschylus, “The Prometheus Bound,” will soon forget the eager, breathless attention of those Maine lumbermen who composed her audience.  .  .  . I recall, certainly, very vividly, my own delight when the college President who was one of our party, after having peeped carefully at her book through his spectacles, came to me and announced that she was really reading out of a book written in Greek. “It is perfectly wonderful,” he said, “how well she does render the play. I have heard it a thousand times before, but I never really listened to it until to-night.” He had a long talk with her the next morning, and he came back and reported, “What that girl don’t know about Greek syntax and prosody isn’t worth knowing.” I suppose he exaggerated a little, for the well of Greek literature seems very deep to the most of ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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us; but I do know that she read Aeschylus as if she understood the subject thoroughly—read as if her soul was in it, and so carried us along with her by her own enthusiasm, that she became, for the hour, a real power in our lives, just as she was a power in the daily lives of those rough men about her, and just as she would be a wonderful power for culture in the lives of any young girls whose education she might undertake. And this woman is only one of many available women, whose desire for a classical education has compelled them to break through the crust of conventionalities, and through artificial barriers, and draw unto themselves the thing which they so earnestly desired.51 We may wonder who was “that girl” and what was she doing, reading Greek to “those Maine lumbermen” (or for that matter, what “a college President” was doing in their midst). By leaving her anonymous, the article could make this young woman into a representative figure, “only one of many” whose desire for ancient Greek might civilize the apparent wilderness of American letters. Reading Aeschylus “as if her soul was in it,” she had inscribed the text on the tablets of her memory with such enthusiasm that she seemed the very embodiment of ancient Greek: she personified its “wonderful power for culture” not only for “those rough men” in the audience, or “any young girls whose education she might undertake,” but for a new class of women in nineteenth-century America who cultivated classical literacy as “the thing which they so earnestly desired.” From the many women who personified this incorporation of Greek literature into American literary culture, I will consider three final examples in the ongoing saga of Io: Annie Adams Fields (1834–1915), who imported a Greek ideal into Boston’s most famous literary salon at the turn of the century; Edith Hamilton (1867–1963), who articulated an American vision of “The Greek Way” for twentieth-century democracy at home and abroad; and Eva Palmer (1874–1952), who exported her vision of ancient Greece to modern Greece, where she married the poet Angelos Sikelianos and staged the revival of Greek tragedy at Delphi. These American women were “bound” to a rhetoric of freedom in their versions of Prometheus Bound, transposing the problematics of “literal” translation into “free” paraphrase, imitation, and dramatization of Greek letters. In their work, we see how Io was transported from England to America and then back to Greece, perpetually transcribed, transfigured, and transformed by different forms of translation. Mrs. Fields entered the inner circles of New England literary culture by marrying James Fields, publisher of Ticknor & Fields and editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Throughout this first marriage and her subsequent “Boston” 96

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marriage with Sarah Orne Jewett, Fields lived in Boston in a Greek revival townhouse famous for its library, filled with rare books and replicas of Greek and Roman statues: “that friendly home of lettered refinement.”52 Willa Cather later recalled the men and women of letters who frequented the salon at 148 Charles Street, as well as the summer house at Manchester-by-the-Sea where Fields presided as “Lady Juno” of “Thunderbolt Hill,” the goddess of this highminded social sphere.53 Starting in the 1860s, Fields kept a “Journal of Literary Events and Glimpses of Interesting People” that became the basis for her memoirs of Boston literati, including Authors and Friends (1896). This book was not only a tribute to her friendship with famous authors but a testimony to her own cultural work as Boston’s best hostess; as Susan Harris observes, the initials of Annie Adams Fields are inscribed in the very title of her book, placing her simultaneously at the center of her literary circle and on its margins.54 She practiced many forms of mediated authorship by writing in diaries, circulating correspondence, editing manuscripts, and also by writing translations, biographies, and literary reviews as well as various attempts at fiction and poetry. After her death in 1915, her scattered letters and papers were incorporated into Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields, and that is how she has been remembered. More recent biographies reclaim Fields as a Woman of Letters in her own right. Judith Roman remarks that “the image of Annie as a clean slate, waiting to be written upon, is a myth,” and Rita Gollin details her education at George Emerson’s School for Young Ladies, which boasted a college preparatory curriculum and emphasized the formation of character through study of languages.55 Fields learned Latin, Italian, and French, and became an accomplished translator of German along with teaching herself to read some ancient Greek. Inside the back cover of one of her notebooks from 1865, she practiced the Greek alphabet (Figure 2.2). Here we see Fields not waiting to be written upon but actively writing out Greek letters on the page in order to learn the language. Each letter is carefully penned in upper case and lower case, alpha to omega, close to the binding as if she too is bound to “some Greek upon the margin—Lady’s Greek,” appearing literally in the margins of her own writing. However between theta and kappa, there is one letter missing: she has not transcribed iota, the letter for “I.” Like E.B.B. struggling to put Greek verbs in me, she memorized the letters in alphabetical order and inscribed them on the tablet of her memory, trying to insert herself between alpha and omega, yet not quite finding the place to put I before O. In educating herself to read ancient Greek, Fields aligned herself with English Women of Letters who supported the higher education of women. Like ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 97

2.2 Annie Adams Fields, Diary 13, November 1865. Back inside cover. Original manuscript from the Annie Fields Papers. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Webster and Swanwick and Case, she combined her literary activities with philanthropy, social reform, and fundraising for new women’s colleges, where the study of classics became an increasingly essential component of an elite female education.56 But Fields was aware that her own incomplete knowledge of Greek fell short of her English counterparts. In drafting an essay on Swinburne’s imitation of a Greek tragedy, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), she admitted she was not well-versed in Greek and “it would probably be more befitting and more just to the poem before us that a Grecian should write concerning it.”57 98

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Yet her own deficiencies as a “Grecian” enabled her to articulate a broader difference between classical education in England and America: “We are writing in America where the lives of men are often far apart from the lives of their English brothers who generation after generation are born and learn Greek and die doubtless thereby fulfilling the purposes of their lives as well as others who do not learn Greek.” Although those who “learn Greek” from birth seem if anything less purposeful than those “who do not learn Greek,” classical learning may still have some purpose for Americans in reading poetry inspired by Greek. “Atalanta in Calydon is still a poem to us,” she concluded, and “perhaps therefore the unlearned should speak of it,” even and especially in America, where ancient Greek might take root in a new land: “From the days of Pythagoras to those of Abraham Lincoln truth like the seed of maple trees has been sailed by wings on which it flies to every fruitful soil. And thus the Grecian fables, fables even to themselves as the Platonists loved to teach, contain as fine a signification,” perhaps as much “from the lover of translation as for him who reads them in the ancient letters.” Beyond making an apology for reading ancient letters in translation, Fields was staking a stronger claim for modern imitation: by translating Greek in new ways, it would be possible to transplant the Grecian fables and thus cultivate new poetry in America. Rather than translating “literally” from the Greek, Anne Fields wrote loose imitations of classical authors. Her notebooks included a fragmentary poem based on Prometheus Bound, perhaps also inspired by Goethe’s “Prometheus. Dramatisches Fragment,” but focusing more on the figure of Io than Prometheus (Figure 2.3). Entitled “The Flight of Io,” it paraphrases the Io episode from Aeschylus in order to imagine Io’s wanderings across the earth.58 In the first two pages of the manuscript, the poem begins with a monologue in twobeat lines that dramatize the leaping movement of Io, “no longer a maid” but transformed into a cow who must kick up her heels and flee to new lands: Away! Let me leap, From steep to steep; No longer a maid; Of the desert afraid, To earth’s farthest bound Beyond human sound: Let me leap, let me flee, To that desolate sea, Where the plunging waves Sink to sunless caves! ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 99

2.3 Annie Fields, “The Flight of Io.” MS poem in a notebook labeled “Manchester, 1880.” Papers of James Thomas Fields Addenda, Box 2 (8), Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Escaping “to earth’s farthest bound / Beyond human sound,” she discovers the sight and sound of Prometheus bound to the rock: Ha! Who is here, On this peak of fear! Vision of dread, Who hast made thy bed On this unkind mount! Here is no fount; Hither I came, From the smoke and the flame, From the dart and the heat Of trampling feet And of eyes that devour. Arriving “on this peak of fear” and “this unkind mount,” the long-suffering Io finds no release, but another version of her own pain. The spectacle of Prometheus visited daily by the vulture is a “vision of dread” that corresponds to her suffering, tortured by the dart of the gadfly and devoured by the hundred eyes of Argos hot in her pursuit. In her misery, she does not recognize Prometheus at first, as she goes on to ask, on the next page of the manuscript: “Tell me, who art thou / God of the furrowed brow.” At this point the paraphrase of Io’s speech in Prometheus Bound becomes a dialogue, with the name of Prometheus prominently underscored on the page. When he reveals himself to Io, he declares (true to his name) that he knows who she is and what will be the past, present, and future of all her wandering: Daughter of Inachus, Known to Prometheus. Though a heifer’s form hide Thy beauty and pride, Zeus who is cruel to me Late has been cruel to thee! I know thee daughter of woe And whither thy feet shall go! Zeus hath snatched thee away From the lightning play Of myriad gazing eyes; But thou must flee ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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Further than eye may see And whither no sea-bird knows, To shun the wrongs and the blows, Of the Queen, the jealous woman. But the wrath of Juno, the jealous woman who sent Argos to watch over Io, is gradually transformed by Fields (Lady Juno of Thunderbolt Hill) into a vision of Io that redeems her suffering. In seven more manuscript pages of dramatic dialogue, Io asks Prometheus to reveal the end of her misery, and Prometheus (moving from dimeter and trimeter into longer pentameter lines) narrates at length the distances in time and space that she must travel before she can rest. Finally the poem concludes with his prophecy: Enough! Enough! There is an end to pain. Life lies beyond the present agony; And Zeus shall shelter thee whom he hath loved. Thou shalt receive again Thy woman’s form, And love and peace shall be The end of wandering and the end of storm. Thou who hast moved Through the long ages patiently and sad, Thou shalt be glad! Thou shalt bear a son! And ages hence His children’s children shall avenge for thee, The wrong that Zeus hath done; But thou shalt sleep In peace thy long flight ended, Where no peep Of morning bird shall wake thee, nor the creep Of opal waters over misty strands, Nor winter by his mighty troop of hurricanes attended. Thus Io is restored to “woman’s form” by Fields, in a poem that predicts the final resting place of Io far in the future: a peaceful life and a peaceful death, “in peace thy long flight ended.” “The Flight of Io” was never published; it is listed among “eleven poetry notebooks and unbound poems,” dated around 1880.59 But in this draft, Fields 102

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imagined Io bound toward new freedom in the future of this poem: a free translation of Aeschylus where Io would be unbound from the Greek text and, after moving “through the long ages patiently and sad,” be translated by an American woman into a “woman’s form.” Thus Io was transported by Fields to a new world of women’s poetry, where future generations of “children’s children shall avenge for thee.” Here the poem predicted not only the unbinding of Prometheus but also the future generations of poets, and especially American women poets like Fields herself, who would remember the long flight of Io from past to present. Rather than bringing Io back to life, however, the poem ended by remembering her death, “where no peep / Of morning bird shall wake thee.” This was not so much a moment of mourning, but a recognition that the story of Io depended on the transmission of dead letters for its own afterlife, the survival of literature from the past in the present poem. Fields composed “The Flight of Io” just as she was completing her first book of poetry for publication. After the anonymous or pseudonymous publication of poems in literary periodicals throughout the 1860s and 1870s, and after the private publication of a verse drama entitled The Return of Persephone in 1877, Fields finally published Under the Olive in 1881: the first of several volumes of verse inspired by classical themes, including later The Singing Shepherd (1895) and Orpheus: A Masque (1900). Not only did she turn to classical subjects for her poetry, but she also made classical transmission the very subject of her poetry. By claiming classical literacy, her aim was “persistently to reclassicize the American English vernacular,” as Mary Loeffelholz has observed: “Fields’s epigraph for Under the Olive . . . summons ‘The Dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule / Our spirits from their urns.’ It might fairly be said of almost all of Fields’s poetry that she had no subject save for that announced in this epigraph, no subject save for the transmission of Culture, indeed no desire save for Culture itself.”60 Following the epigraph, her aesthetic mission was further elaborated in the table of contents for Under the Olive, where Fields conjured up the spirits of dead poets such as Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Anacreon, Theocritus to inspire her verse, along with her translations of Greek-inspired verse drama by Goethe at the end of the volume.61 Under the Olive began, after a prelude and several lyric invocations, with “The Last Contest of Aeschylus”: a narrative poem in blank verse that reflected explicitly on the transmission of classical culture from older to younger poets. Introduced in her poem as “Aeschylus, with weight of many years / O’erladen, master of the tragic art,” the aging tragedian presents his last script to be judged in the annual dramatic contest at Athens: “Proudly he bore a scroll, though ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 103

heavy age / Delayed his feet, and proudly laid it down / Before the judges” (p. 19). He is followed by lesser poets (“Forever in the footsteps of the great / Came a long line of weaklier aspirants”), but one stands out “with head erect and shining eyes, / As if the beacon of some promised land / Caught his strong vision” (p. 20–21). It is Sophocles who represents the new world as “some promised land” for the future of poetry, and it is Sophocles who wins the prize. The judges announce to Aeschylus that he has lost the contest: O Aeschylus! The father of our song! Athenian master of the tragic lyre Thou the incomparable! Swayer of strong hearts! Immortal minstrel of immortal deeds! The autumn grows apace, and all must die. (p. 22) Thus Aeschylus “the old man, bending lower / Under this new chief weight of all the years” leaves the tragic scene, lamenting: “The last! The last! Have I no more to do / With this sweet world! Is the spring morning / No longer fraught for me with crowding song!” In this drama of poetic succession, the autumn of Aeschylus gives way to the spring of Sophocles, and like the changing of the seasons, the old world gives way to the new. Under the Olive can be read as a Progress of Poesy, beginning with Aeschylus and leading toward a new vision of Prometheus, translated by Fields in Goethe’s Pandora at the end of the volume. Subscribing to a myth of literary origins in classical antiquity, Fields followed the traces of Aeschylean drama from ancient Greece through various European imitations so that Aeschylus would finally arrive in America. This mythical progression had already been announced by Fields in Asphodel—a novel in the form of a classical tragedy, published in 1866 with limited success—where she made a proud claim for New England literary culture: “The Child of New England looks toward the East, saying, Now is the high noon of the world; we will bid farewell to the mists of earlier hours, and lands overladen by the history of ages, gathering from these what we need, but leaving the rest to decay upon the parent soil.”62 What Americans lacked in classical learning (from ancient Greece, and mediated by Hellenism in nineteenthcentury Germany and England) might liberate them to imagine ancient texts with greater freedom, no longer “overladen by the history of ages,” but freely recreated in New England. So also Aeschylus, “with weight of many years / O’erladen,” was left behind to decay and die in “The Last Contest of Aeschylus,” after Fields had gathered what she needed from Aeschylean tragedy to make it grow again in new soil. And so also, in “The Flight of Io,” Fields privately 104

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imagined the Io of Aeschylus wandering far and wide and finally to a peaceful death, as part of poetry’s progress to the West. The response from American readers was mixed. In a letter to Fields, Charles Dudley Warner of The Hartford Courant felt “as if I had visited the temple of Apollo, and been waited on by the priestess,” and enthusiastically reprinted several poems from Under the Olive in his newspaper. As a personal friend to Fields, and himself sympathetic to the idea of classicizing the American vernacular, Longfellow also congratulated Fields on her “double success— the esoteric and the exoteric, as the Pythagoreans would say: the success in the book itself, and its success with the public, which is sure to follow.”63 But even with praise from the literati, the public was not so sure to follow. After reading Under the Olive, Harriet Beecher Stowe complained to Fields, “You have gained the plaudits of all the knowing ones—I am delighted to read the words of the press. I hardly know enough to follow you—It is so long since I used to turn to my classical dictionary & knew about all those mythic stories.”64 And although The Atlantic Monthly called it “an exceptional volume,” even here (so close to home) the reviewer acknowledged its appeal was esoteric: “Yet it is likely to miss general appreciation, and to fall, at first sight, only half noticed even on the attention of the cultivated, because its spirit and utterance are so largely in sympathy with the calm, unassertive Greek love of the beautiful.”65 Other reviews questioned the cultivation of classical taste, especially by and for women. While “The Last Contest of Aeschylus” was among several poems singled out for praise, The Literary World concluded: “The Promethean epos is a theme beyond the writer’s powers; but failure is hardly a fault in a field where even Mrs. Browning did not succeed.”66 Of course, Fields was eager to be read as a successor to E.B.B, even if it meant identifying her own name with “a field where even Mrs. Browning did not succeed.” She had met the Brownings in person, and although she disagreed with Mrs. Browning’s politics and later took a personal dislike to Mr. Browning, she saw in E.B.B. the prototype of a poetess whose classicizing verse might inspire her own.67 And like E.B.B., Fields was remembered as a Woman of Greek Letters. In 1916, a year after the death of Fields, her friend Harriett Prescott Spofford wrote in A Book of Little Friends that “she infused humanity and today into the thoughts and fancies of a dead world, and made old legends live with new life.”68 Yet this new life was predicated on the deadness of the past, so that even the living voice of Fields seemed (at least to Spofford) to sound like an imitation in English of her own Greek imitations: “She read to you in a voice like the voice of the dove her Demeter sang about, or like the double flute, you think, that one of her own Greek girls might be breathing through.” Like Io, a ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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dead letter brought to life in “The Flight of Io,” Fields herself was an old legend that could be made to “live with new life” through translation from a dead language. In order to become an American poetess, Fields first had to be Greek. Toward the end of her life Fields did in fact visit Greece, together with Sarah Orne Jewett. Following the tracks of Io in reverse, they went by modern transportation: after traveling by steamer to Corfu and sailing to the Greek mainland, they took “the trains going along the southern shore of Corinth” to Athens, where finally at sunset “we saw the light on the Acropolis and all the great pillars of the Parthenon high against the sky.”69 They had been invited to Athens by Mary Elizabeth Garrett, a wealthy friend from Baltimore who had founded Bryn Mawr School for Girls in 1885 and also contributed to the foundation of Bryn Mawr College for Women. Bryn Mawr in particular was known for its cultivation (not to say cult) of Greek, since its President M. Carey Thomas had studied classical and modern philology and required at least one semester of Greek studies for all students. Along with her friendship with Fields, Garrett was a close friend of Thomas as well; by the end of the century, these overlapping circles of female friendships were often defined by passion for all things Greek, so it was not surprising that Fields and Garrett would meet in Greece. Garrett occupied a position between the generation of American women like Fields, who were primarily self-educated in Greek, and a new generation of American women who could receive a classical education in college. This new generation included Edith Hamilton, who earned her B.A./M.A. in Greek and Latin at Bryn Mawr College from 1890 to 1895. Here she was invited to join an elite sorority that caused a controversy on campus, as Hamilton reported in a letter to her sister: “Shall Bryn Mawr have secret societies? . . . Did you know of the Φ Β Γ or some other equally luminous combination of Greek letters? It has existed in college for a year now. The members are fourteen . . . no one knows the principle of selection.”70 The secret society was short-lived, but Hamilton’s fascination with the “luminous combination of Greek letters” continued for the rest of her life. She won the Mary E. Garrett fellowship for a year of graduate study in Germany, although her sister recalled that there “Edith was deeply disappointed in her Greek and Latin courses. The lecturers were very thorough linguistically but most uninspiring. Instead of the grandeur and beauty of Aeschylus and Sophocles, it seemed that the most important thing was their use of the second aorist.”71 Classical scholarship was not Hamilton’s primary interest, as Helen Bacon observes: “Though she became a symbol of scholarship for a large public, Edith Hamilton was not, and did not claim to be, a scholar, or even a popularizer of the scholarly work of others. Throughout her career her commitment was 106

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not the scholars’ commitment to the facts of the past that require demonstration, but to the unverifiable ‘truths of the spirit,’ which she thought she found in ancient writers.”72 It was Hamilton’s desire to find the “spirit” in the letter that contributed to her broad appeal as a translator and interpreter of Greek tragedy, and made her into a notable American Woman of Letters. In 1960 she was invited back to Bryn Mawr for an honorary citation, summing up how she approached classical literature with the passion of an amateur rather than the precision of a philologist: Recognized today for her eminence as a classicist, an honorary citizen of Athens, and the recipient from King Paul of Greece of the Golden Cross of the Order of Benefaction, Edith Hamilton began to write at the age of sixty after having retired from her first career as Headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. Now a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has published steadily, writing with eloquence and style worthy of her classical examples. . . . Known to her American public through popular magazines, radio, and television, her books sold by the hundreds of thousands, Miss Hamilton—a woman of “wit and humanity”—has probably done more than any living American to inspire an interest in classical civilization.73 Because Hamilton was seen to exemplify—indeed, embody—the style of her classical examples, she was very much in keeping with the Victorian legacy of Ladies’ Greek, well into the twentieth century. Like Swanwick, she became a public figure who advocated for the civilizing influence of the classics in the modern world, through best-selling books such as The Greek Way (1930), The Roman Way (1932), and her ever-popular Mythology (1940). When Hamilton told the story of Prometheus in Mythology, she emphasized that “his body was bound but his spirit was free” because “he refused to submit to cruelty and tyranny,” thus turning him into an icon for American freedom around the world: “His name has stood through all the centuries, from Greek days to our own, as that of the great rebel against injustice and the authority of power.”74 But she dedicated just as many pages to the story of Io, “a distracted fleeing creature” that “looked like a heifer, but talked like a girl who seemed mad with misery” (p. 95). Through all of her wandering, “it seemed then that Io was free, but no;” here Hamilton stopped to remind her readers that the liberation of both Prometheus and Io was still to come. “Prometheus tried to comfort her, but he could point her only to the distant future,” to Io’s descendant, “to whom Prometheus would owe his freedom” (p.99). Through ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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Greek mythology, Hamilton could narrate a very American story about the promise of freedom and liberation of the oppressed: a Promethean myth of progress that would be fulfilled in the future, by a civilization that would learn to read his story as its own. To make this claim for classical transmission, and to teach a new form of classical literacy, Hamilton started her second career as a public intellectual by translating Prometheus Bound. Lamenting a lack of American translations, she wrote in 1926 to a former student: “When I gave my lectures last year on the Greek tragedians I found that the one essential was to give my class translations—and I could find none at all that was not a travesty.” Yet she encountered resistance from American publishers: “All they did was to tell me that so few people now-a-days were studying Greek, there would be probably little interest in translations from the Greek! Whereas to me, their argument works precisely the other way. If people read Greek no translations would be needed.” For this very reason, Hamilton encountered resistance from classicists as well: “You see, one of my difficulties is that my college friends are Greek and Latin people who do not use translations. Their attitude is that they work against the study of Latin and Greek. And they despise them too.” But somewhere between those who would not read Greek in translation and those who would not read Greek at all, Hamilton discovered her calling as a translator: “I feel convinced that there is a wide field for translations that give, in some faint degree, an idea of that almost unsurpassed beauty and truth which so few today can know anything about.”75 Mediating between the few and the many, her mission would be to represent “an idea” of knowing “about” Greek. In 1927 Hamilton’s translation of Prometheus Bound was published in Theatre Arts Monthly, with an introduction that emphasized the modernity of the play: “The Prometheus is unlike any other ancient play. Only in the most modern theatre is a parallel to be found.”76 According to Hamilton, “it is a psychological drama” which will not “seem strange to the modern reader, but a real difficulty is presented by Io, a distracted fleeing creature, quite mad, who seems now a girl and now a heifer, and by her talk with Prometheus, running into hundreds of lines, which consists largely of geography. These are matters that an ancient and a modern spectator would necessarily look at differently because so much of what was known to them is strange to us and vice versa.” Here the problem of (not) knowing ancient Greek was displaced from “the modern reader” onto the difference between “an ancient and a modern spectator,” turning the textual performance of the translator into the idea of a theatrical performance. The inscription of letters in the body of Io could thus be seen as a representation of classical literacy, but without having to read Greek. 108

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To make Io seem less strange to the modern reader, Hamilton created a more contemporary idiom for her translation. The contrast with other versions we have considered so far is striking. Rather than turning the Aeschylean text into high Victorian verse (like E.B.B., or Webster, or Swanwick), or into prose with Greek text on facing pages (like Case), or into free paraphrase (like Fields), Hamilton translated the Io episode into the spare diction of American modernist verse. When Io enters the play, she addresses Prometheus as “a form storm-beaten” in strong two and three-beat lines that emphasize the similarity between his misery and hers. And when she leaves the stage, the pounding beat of the poetry turns Io herself into another storm-beaten form, like Prometheus: O misery. O misery. A frenzy tears me. Madness strikes my mind. I burn. A frantic sting— an arrow never forged with fire. My heart is beating at its walls in terror. My eyes are whirling wheels. Away. Away. A raging wind of fury sweeps through me. My tongue has lost its power. My words are like a turbid stream, wild waves that dash against a surging sea, the black sea of madness. [Exit Io] (560) The stormy description of her pain, striking with “a raging wind of fury” and “wild waves that dash against a surging sea,” anticipates the storm that will descend on Prometheus at the end of the play: “Whirlwinds toss the swirling dust. / The blasts of all the winds are battling in the air, / And sky and sea are one. / On me the tempest falls” (562). Like Io, he is reduced from I to “me,” the object of suffering. Hamilton’s translation of Prometheus Bound was reprinted ten years later in Three Greek Plays (1937), with some revisions and several essays. In the first of these, “On Translating,” Hamilton explained that she had taken some liberties in translating Greek tragedy: “I have not held myself bound to any fixed meter,” she wrote, “Nor have I made any attempt to keep all the lines the same length” because “the use of a line of varying length sets the translator free from the necessity of padding.”77 For Hamilton, the paradox of translating Prometheus ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound

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Bound was that she felt simultaneously bound to a fixed text, without holding herself “bound to any fixed meter.” Entangled in the question of “literal” translation, Hamilton asked: “What are [translators] to try for? Not a complete literal fidelity. . . . No: a bald word-for-word translation of a Greek play would accomplish nothing at all” (11). Taking up the idea that a translation should be “as faithful as it can, as free as it must,” she proclaimed her translator’s credo: “I believe that the best a translator can hope for on that point is to convey some of his own enthusiasm, something of the impression the poem made upon him,” but “his enthusiasm will be regulated by a careful regard for the way his original writes” (12). There was no final resolution to the bondage of the translator, who is bound to a literal translation that is also bound to be free. Indeed, like the suffering of Prometheus and Io in her translation, she concluded that “it is the special hardship of a translator’s lot” to suffer the consequences of “misrepresenting or distorting” the original text (14–15). While Hamilton herself did suffer criticism from classical scholars for misrepresenting Greek, she represented “the Greek way” to many American readers. In a 1965 advertisement for The Greek Way, C. M. Bowra wrote that “Miss Hamilton started from the best, the right, the only possible point—the actual texts of Greek literature. These she knew from the inside, not through translations and commentaries but through the original words, which are remarkable for their clarity and elegance and force. With this knowledge she was able to turn her feminine intuition in many directions, to adapt herself easily and almost unconsciously to the writers whom she studied, and to extract from their work what appealed most deeply to her and seemed to be the most significant.”78 As a translator, Hamilton seemed to embody the “original” experience of reading Greek: the “remarkable . . . force” of the original words was marked on her own memory and turned into “feminine intuition” that was “almost unconsciously” repeated in her own writing. As a medium for classical transmission, mediating between the professionalization and popularization of classics, she had become the American embodiment of Ladies’ Greek. Furthermore, her personal identification with Greek letters was incorporated into the body politic, as Judith Hallett observes: Hamilton was “widely read and revered in mid-century America as a modern-day emissary from the enlightening domain of classical antiquity” and often quoted by Robert F. Kennedy, who memorized lines from her translations of Aeschylus, as if these words had been inscribed in the remembering tablets of his own heart.79 Hamilton’s insistence on the civilizing power of Athenian democracy contributed to a postwar vision of American democracy at home and abroad. Indeed she was invited to Greece in 1957 to be made an honorary citizen of Athens, where 110

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her translation of Prometheus Bound was performed in the Greek amphitheater and she gave a public speech proclaiming that “freedom was a Greek discovery” and “the Greeks were the first free nation in the world.”80 Paradoxically it was through her translation from ancient Greek that modern Greeks were supposed to rediscover that they, too, were bound to a new-found freedom: “In the Prometheus they have sent a ringing call down through the centuries to all who would be free.” Hamilton’s Greek way had become the great American way. But Hamilton was not the first American to bring Prometheus back to modern Greece. When she first published her translation in 1927, Theatre Arts Monthly included two illustrations from a recent production of the tragedy in Greece. One was a Greek mask, and the other was a photo identified as “the old theatre at Delphi in which the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus has come to life again within the past few months under the direction of Angelo Sikelianos.”81 The dramaturge behind the scenes was in fact his wife, the wealthy American Eva Palmer Sikelianos who had spent most of her fortune on the creation of this spectacle in 1927 and again in 1930. She orchestrated the performance in modern Greek, supervising the choreography, the music, the costumes, the set design, and coordinating large groups of actors and spectators to create a theater festival that was intended to surpass the revival of classical drama at other festivals in the early twentieth century. This vision was inspired by the “Delphic Idea” of the visionary Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos, and Prometheus was chosen to embody the idea of the modern Greek nation in chains, revolting against tyranny and preparing for its liberation. It was also a vision inspired by his wife’s passion for ancient Greek, who had developed her own ideas about the embodiment of Greek tragedy at Delphi. Perhaps even more than the immobilized figure of Prometheus, pinned to a large crag in the middle of the theater, she was interested in the movement of the chorus, composed of fifty women dancing and singing around him in a carefully choreographed performance. Hamilton was fascinated by this dramatic reinvention of the chorus. In “The Greek Chorus: Fifteen or Fifty?” (an essay from 1933), she called into question the emphasis on reading Greek texts during her early years at Bryn Mawr. “When I was a girl at college I was taught a neat and simple scheme . . . of the Greek tragic drama,” she wrote, wondering why “the chorus always numbered fifteen.82” Observing that “the scholars who established these dogmas of the Athenian stage were men of the library, not the theatre,” she decided that the dogmas must be re-examined: “People are theatre-conscious today as in no other age and, as a result, Greek tragedy has been brought out of the library on to the boards” (49– 50). Taking Greek tragedy out of the libraries, out of the books, off the page, and into the theater was the dramatic challenge that Hamilton recognized in ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 111

Palmer’s production of Prometheus Bound: “The theatrical difficulty involved in it presented itself first to my mind when I was shown pictures of the performances four or five years ago of the Prometheus at Delphi” (51). Curious to know more about this ambitious, extravagant, and perhaps eccentric project, Hamilton sent a letter addressed to “Mrs. Sikelianos,” and they developed a correspondence that became increasingly friendly. They recognized one another as kindred spirits, as Hamilton wrote to Palmer, “The Greeks were right when they said it is when we are like each other that is important, not when we are different,”83 and Palmer wrote in turn to Hamilton: “I belong to what is sometimes called the lunatic fringe. Moreover, I believe that you do too.”84 No doubt there were important differences between the two women, politically and otherwise, but what they had in common was a desire to stay on the outer edge (or “lunatic fringe”) of academia. Rather than claiming the authority of professional philology, they were self-professed amateurs whose love of Greek circulated more freely around the margins of classical scholarship. Like Hamilton, the young Eva Palmer started her Greek studies at Bryn Mawr, and their interest in Greek tragedy was shaped by similar institutional frameworks and social networks.85 Both had inherited the Victorian legacy of Ladies’ Greek, and were actively redefining what classical literacy might look like for women in the twentieth century. But while Hamilton was creating a modern idiom for translating Greek text on the page, Palmer was experimenting with new ways to present Greek on the stage, not as a textual performance but as scripted choreography that could mobilize letters as bodies in motion.86 Rather than translating the Aeschylean text into English, the performance at Delphi was delivered in modern Greek and dramatically transformed into movement. The poster advertising Prometheus Bound at Delphi included eight photographs in sequence, each with a chorus member striking a different pose (Figure 2.4). This sequence of bodies could be read as an alphabetic series, almost like the Greek alphabet, bringing dead letters to life by creating a new language of movement. The articulation of female bodies into a series of dance poses, moving rhythmically in pauses and coordinated gestures, was one of Palmer’s great theatrical achievements at Delphi. The garments they wore, woven by Palmer herself, were designed to recreate sculptural folds that made the dancers look like an archaic frieze in slow motion. She created elaborate dance formations, diagramming their movement on the circle of the orchestra at Delphi, and transforming the motion of individual bodies into the collective body of the chorus. Contrasting with the slow and stylized choreography of the chorus was the rapid motion of Io, performed by a solo dancer whose entrance created a 112

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2.4 Advertisement for Prometheus Bound, performed at 1927 Delphic Festival. Le Journal des Hellenes (April 24, 1927).

rhythmic counterpoint or syncopation in the presentation of the tragedy. Much as Io’s speech prompted translators to find greater metrical variation in their language, Palmer invented a more mobile dance vocabulary marked by sudden twists and turns of the body, with limbs extended at odd angles. Unlike the chorus members who did not wear masks, Io appeared with a mask—shaped like the head of a cow and disproportionately large—that contributed to this sense of physical contortion and linguistic distortion.87 Furthermore, a figure of the gadfly torturing Io was actually woven into the fabric of her costume, close to her leg, making it impossible to separate the body from the source of its suffering. The figure of Io was thus deformed and transformed into a theatrical spectacle in which the Greek letters inscribed on her body could be made dramatically visible on stage: even more than the speech delivered by Io, it seemed that her body did the talking. Through this “translation” of Io, Palmer also transformed herself into a Woman of Greek Letters. After wandering like Io from America through Europe to Greece, she lived at Delphi in a house where she wove her own Greek garments to wear instead of modern clothes. When she traveled through America to raise funds for her vision of the Delphi festival, she herself seemed a vision of Greece, and was often described as such in the American press. At the end of her life, when she returned to Delphi for a revival of Prometheus Bound, she fell into a coma after the last of four performances, and was buried at Delphi, where she was remembered as the woman who had brought ancient ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 113

Greece back to life. The novelist and historian Robert Payne provides a sample of the popular lore surrounding her. “She was one of those rare women who possess the power of raising the dead . . . and no one who ever saw her felt that she belonged entirely to this world,” he wrote in The Splendor of Greece: She was born Eva Palmer in New York . . . and is buried in Delphi high above the theater of Eumenes, with the brilliant stones of Apollo’s temple guarding the approaches to her tomb. “She was the only ancient Greek I ever knew,” a modern Greek actress told me. “She had a strange power of entering the minds of the ancients and bringing them to life again. She knew everything about them—how they walked and talked in the marketplace, how they laced their shoes, how they arranged the folds of their gowns when they arose from table, and what songs they sang, and how they danced.”88 As Artemis Leontis argues in her critical biography, Palmer moved beyond reading, writing, and translating Greek in order to embody Greek letters in multiple media: she sought to reanimate a dead language as an art of the everyday, “raising the dead” and “bringing them to life” to transform modern living.89 But in making the ancients seem modern, Palmer also made herself seem ancient. While she spoke and wrote in modern Greek, Palmer attempted to recreate ancient Greek by incorporating the alphabet as an archaic language of and for herself. Her self-conscious identification with Greek letters is visible in a photograph of Palmer, posing with the mask of Io (Figure 2.5). Palmer is gazing at the mask while the mask gazes into the eye of the camera, a curious animation of an empty gaze that makes the mask seem more alive than Palmer. Seeing herself through the eye of the mask, Palmer is identified with Io, as the image of a dead letter that she holds out for her (and our) contemplation. The horns on the mask look like an inverted omega, reversing the “I” of Palmer into the “O” of Io, and inviting us to read this image in reverse: it is not Palmer who animates the dead letter but rather the dead letter animating Palmer, as she embodies once again the Greek verbs in me. Seen within the history of women translating Prometheus Bound, this portrait reveals the gendering of classical literacy that connects Palmer’s Io back to the Io’s of Edith Hamilton, Annie Fields, Janet Case, Anna Swanwick, Augusta Webster, all the way back to E.B.B. These women inscribed Greek letters on the tablets of their memory like Io, whose “I” is translated from Greek and incorporated into their own body of writing. In their various versions of Aeschylus they made their mark as Women of Letters, mediating between classical scholarship 114

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2.5 Eva Palmer Sikelianos with the mask of Io (1927). Benaki Museum—Historical Archives. Eva Palmer-Sikelianos archive. Inv. no. 189.

and the popularization of classics and thus proving a powerful medium for classical transmission. By transliterating, transcribing, translating, and transforming Prometheus Bound, they dramatized their encounter with ancient Greek as a scene of writing charged with both desire and discipline, pleasure and pain, eros and pathos: a scene where the translation of Greek letters could never be literal enough.

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The Education of Electra Behold and See The entry of nineteenth-century women into Greek studies generated many forms of translation. Not only were women translating tragedy in miscellaneous notebooks, letters, journals, and other writing, for personal edification and for literary publication, but they started translating these texts into performance as another way to dramatize their passion for Greek letters: the act of reading Greek tragedy on the page was transferred to, and also transformed by, the experience of enacting it on stage. Their amateur theatricals, including tableaux vivants, public recitations, and student productions in the late nineteenth century, paved the way to professional performances of Greek tragedy, in commercial theaters, outdoor amphitheaters, and classical drama festivals that proved popular in the twentieth century. Thus women on both sides of the Atlantic played a central role in the longer history of performing Greek tragedy, as described by Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh in their ground-breaking research for Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, and by Helene Foley in her equally ground-breaking research for Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage.1 The foundation and expansion of women’s colleges in the late nineteenth century contributed to the revival of Greek tragedy, as it was performed in English translations and sometimes even in ancient Greek by students eager to be seen as Women of Greek Letters. Having internalized Greek through memorization, they projected outward what had been inscribed in the tablet of their memory, demonstrating how Greek letters might be externalized and visualized to produce other ways of knowing Greek. This chapter focuses in particular on two college productions of the Electra of Sophocles, staged in the 1880s in ancient Greek by the first generation of women students at Girton College and at Smith College. Going beyond identification with ancient Greek to define individual literary character, these women also turned to Greek tragedy to define the literary character of their college, in a collective performance of female classical literacy that had multiple significations both within and beyond the college community. As Clare 116

Foster demonstrates in her research on the history of the Cambridge Greek play, student performances were more than a merely antiquarian exercise, allowing both actors and spectators to see Greek tragedy not only as a text for reading and recitation but as a pretext for translation into the semiotics of gesture, movement, music, costume, and set design. And as students’ dramatic presentation of Electra was further re-presented in newspaper reports, magazine, articles, letters, journals, memoirs, student publications, albums, scrapbooks, musical scores, photographs, and other illustrations, we can see how translation across different modes, genres, and media of representation contributed to the transatlantic circulation of Ladies’ Greek. Sophocles’ Electra was considered appropriate for performance in women’s colleges because it featured a chorus of unmarried women and a mournful heroine, who seemed to embody proper womanhood within a Victorian culture of mourning. Nineteenth-century readings of the play tended to emphasize the piety of Electra; defined by grief for her father and brother, she could be interpreted as a dutiful daughter and sister who is devoted to the restoration of patriarchal order.2 This Victorian image of Electra was perpetuated in texts intended for study in school and universities, such as Electra (1867), edited by Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, the Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge who later produced a monumental edition of Sophocles, including a revised text of Electra with notes and an English prose translation (1894). Unlike later interpreters who increasingly emphasized the “darker” side of Electra as a tragedy dominated by matricide and a heroine driven mad with grief and rage, Jebb wrote in 1867 that it is “pervaded by a keen tone of life and vigour” and “in the clearness of its purpose and in its sanguine energy, there is abundant reassurance . . . that the powers of light are in the ascendant.”3 He did not question Electra’s fixation on the dead; to the contrary, the “keen tone” of the tragedy sounded just right for a keening woman. In his 1894 edition, combining scholarly attention to the text with bellettristic appreciation, Jebb admired the power of her laments in particular: “the union in Electra of tenderness with strength can be felt throughout and finds expression in more than one passage of exquisite beauty.”4 According to Jebb, “one of the finest traits in the delineation of Electra by Sophocles is the manner in which he suggests that inward life of the imagination into which she has shrunk back from the world around her,”5 and it was precisely through Electra’s mourning for the dead that women could dramatize “that inward life of the imagination” in a collegiate setting, while also performing for the public imagination. Electra’s rituals of lamentation gave women an active role to play in college productions, enacting grief not for resolution but for its prolongation in melancholia: a counterdiscourse within The Education of Electra

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3.1 Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon, painting by Frederic Leighton (1869). Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Museums, UK. Bridgeman Images.

Victorian discourses of mourning that produced its own theatrical effects, and proved productive as a cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic performance. Electra was often represented as melancholy figure in Victorian art and literature, and quite dramatically in a painting by Frederic Leighton, exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1869 (figure 3.1).6 Electra looms large, standing next to a Doric column and draped in heavy dark robes with sculptural folds that make her look like another column herself: lifting her arms over her head, she is posed like a sculpture, nearly turned to stone in grief. The architectural setting in the background has a distant wall with two remote figures looking down, like spectators in a theater, on the tragic figure of Electra, as she has descended a series of steps to arrive here, in front of us, at the depths of her despair. At her feet are archaic pots associated with Greek funeral rites: a large urn with a wreath of leaves as funeral offering, a flask spilling oil for libations, and a shallow drinking bowl that depicts a maenad, a raving woman who seems to embody the extreme emotional state of Electra. While this monumental painting has all the trappings of a classical funerary monument, it is more Victorian than Greek, as Leighton’s Electra—absorbed in her own suffering, 118

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with her eyes closed—seems to be looking inward with an interiority lacking in ancient Greek sculpture. Framed as a portrait of a woman lost in grief, seemingly unconscious of being seen, it is a theatrical representation of Electra’s inner drama for contemplation by Victorian viewers. So also, as a glimpse into the psyche of a melancholy woman, E.B.B. created a literary portrait of herself “as once Electra.” In a sonnet addressed to Robert Browning (written during their courtship from 1845–46, and published in Sonnets from the Portuguese in 1850), E.B.B. invokes Electra to recall the years she mourned her dead brother: I lift my heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I overturn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. But if instead Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up, . . . those laurels on thine head, O My beloved, will not shield thee so, That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred The hair beneath. Stand further off then! go!7 The sonnet performs contradictory imperatives. It begins with an invitation to “behold and see / What a great heap of grief lay hid in me,” and ends with a warning to stay away: “Stand further off then! go!” Who is “my beloved” protected by this apotropaic gesture, the living or the dead, the laureled lover or the lost brother? Is the lover warned to “stand further off ” because he stands in for the brother? Although “my heavy heart” is filled with ashes from an old grief, “the red wild sparkles” of that grief (recalling the ashes and sparks that scatter “as from an unextinguished hearth” in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”) may still catch fire and burn anyone who tries to breathe new life, and inspire new poetry, in a woman (call her E.B.B., or Electra) who wants to live only to mourn the dead. Persistently hovering on the threshold of death, insisting on her loss and resisting a return to the living, the mournful woman of this sonnet seems to have stepped out of the Electra of Sophocles in particular. In the Sophoclean The Education of Electra

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version of the tragedy, Electra takes center stage as the very embodiment of mourning. From her first entrance, when the chorus asks why she is forever lamenting (“Why do you always say oimoi without end?” τίν’ ἀεὶ τάκεις ὡδ’ κόρεστον οἰμωγὰν , 122), Electra replies with a double negative: “I can never not mourn” (μὴ οὐ τὸν ἐμὸν στενάχειν,132–333). Suspended in this neverending grief, Electra compares herself to mythical figures like the nightingale who cries out, “Itys, always Itys” (Itun, aien Itun, 148) and of long-suffering Niobe who in a tomb of stone “cries out always” (αἰεὶ δακρύεις, 151–152). The repetition of the adverb “always” (aien and aiei) sounds like the lament aiai, as Nicole Loraux suggests in The Mourning Voice: Electra represents an antiphonal strain in Greek tragedy that interrupts the temporality of the polis through eternal mourning, “the timeless ‘always’ of mourning that seeks to perpetuate itself and that is reinforced by the crying out of lamentation, the aiai.”8 The object of mourning is strangely obscured in E.B.B.’s sonnet, however, because we know that Electra’s “sepulchral urn” turns out to be empty. The urn does not contain the ashes of Orestes, only the words projected into it through Electra’s long speech, lamenting the loss of her brother’s life and therefore her own as well. The pathos of this speech with the urn made a lasting impression on E.B.B., who emphatically marked the passage in the margins of her Greek edition of Electra.9 Like many poets of the period, E.B.B. discovered a poetics of melancholy in the text of Sophocles’ Electra; more than a figure for personal identification, Electra personifies the possibility of identifying with a dead language. What the sonnet asks us to “behold and see” is the transformation of Electra’s mourning into melancholia, according to a logic later psychologized by Freud: Electra’s perpetual mourning prolongs her attachment to the dead by identifying with the lost object of her love and burying it, encrypted, within herself. Woolf also created a vision of Electra for the reader to behold and see, in the mind’s eye. Although she insisted in her reading of Greek that “we cannot hear it,” nevertheless her essay “On Not Knowing Greek” encouraged the desire to imagine it: “We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live. Nevertheless it is the language that has us most in bondage, the desire for that which perpetually lures us back.” This desire for a dead language is exemplified in Woolf ’s essay not only in the untranslatable, naked cry of Cassandra, but also in the lamentation of Electra. Woolf presented the Electra of Sophocles standing before the reader, on an imaginary stage: His Electra stands before us like a figure so tightly bound that she can only move an inch this way, an inch that. But each movement must tell 120

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to the utmost, or, bound as she is, denied the relief of all hints, repetitions, suggestions, she will be nothing but a dummy, tightly bound. Her words in crisis are, as a matter of fact, bare; mere cries of despair, joy, hate. οἴ ᾿γὼ τάλαιν’, ὄλωλα τῇδ’ ἐν ἡμέρᾳ. παῖσον, εἰ σθένεις, διπλῆν. But these cries give angle and outline to the play. (3) Electra is imagined to be a figure as “tightly bound” as the language that has us in bondage. Although she is constrained from speaking and we are constrained from hearing, Electra is not entirely mute and motionless; she is not a “dummy.” To the contrary, her words are most moving at moments of crisis when “each movement must tell to the utmost.” At these moments her language is reduced to “mere cries” that can barely express the full range of what she feels. Electra’s lament oi’go talaina is “strangely compressed,” as Anne Carson points out: “The pronoun ego sacrifices its opening vowel to the encroachment of the exclamatory oi, and then merges immediately with the epithet talaina so as to enclose Electra’s ego in grief from both sides” (“Screaming in Translation,” 43–44). From Woolf ’s perspective, cutting into the language with such cries of grief gives “angle and outline to the play,” creating another perspective on the tragedy of Electra as a text that does not speak, but makes visible the silent performance of reading Greek. Indeed, what Woolf admired about Electra is how “she silences her own complaint” (5). To describe Electra’s long lament early in the play, Woolf quoted the translation by Jebb, in whose version Electra “speaks of that very nightingale, ‘that bird distraught with grief, the messenger of Zeus. Ah queen of sorrow, Niobe, I deem thee divine—thee; who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb.’ ” Electra’s lament is identified with the unhuman song of the nightingale and the stony silence of Niobe, weeping in a language that is no longer human: these figures embody a sign language that does not communicate through words. But again it is at the critical moment of this cry, seemingly before or beyond speech, that Electra seemed to come to life for Woolf: As she speaks thus, her words put on the assurance of immortality. For they are Greek; we cannot tell how they sounded; they owe nothing of their effect to any extravagance of expression, and certainly they throw no light upon the speaker’s character or the writer’s. But they remain, something that has been stated and must eternally endure. The Education of Electra

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The endurance of Electra—both the survival of the play and the eternal suffering of its heroine—does not come from “any extravagance of expression” but is simply “something that has been stated” and can’t quite be expressed; Electra’s words are immortal not because they express a speaker, but because they leave a lasting impression on the reader. Woolf therefore envisioned Electra as an impressive rather than expressive figure. Rather than analyzing what the characters in Greek tragedy are feeling, Woolf was more interested in describing what we feel in encountering these Greek characters as letters on the page. “It is not because we can analyse them into feelings that they impress us,” Woolf writes, insisting that “in the Electra or in the Antigone we are impressed by something different, by something perhaps more impressive,” and this “something” remains difficult to articulate: “in spite of the labour and the difficulty it is this that draws us back and back to the Greeks” (4). We are drawn into the tragedy of Electra through a text that is untranslatable yet strangely desirable, giving both pain and pleasure. Wondering exactly “what it is that gives these cries of Electra in her anguish their power to cut and wound and excite,” Woolf made the experience of reading Electra’s words in Greek seem physically painful, leaving a mark on the reader like a cut or a wound that nevertheless excites a powerful sensation. Electra cuts quite a figure because “in the midst of all this sharpness and compression” she has made a deep impression on Woolf, and so she must impress any reader of the tragedy. This impression of Electra was imprinted on Woolf ’s memory not only by reading the Greek text, but also by Janet Case who taught her to read it. Case had in fact played the role of Electra at Girton College in 1883: one of the earliest college revivals of Greek tragedy to be performed in ancient Greek, and the first at a women’s college. The performance by Case had been so memorable, it was featured in an article published in The Woman’s World several years later (Figure 3.2). Electra stands before us again in the person of Janet Case, another impressive figure much as Woolf described Electra: “a figure so tightly bound” that yet must “tell the utmost,” this portrait of Case in the role of Electra is both motionless and moving. She looks off into the distance with a melancholy gaze, holding the funeral urn that she believes contains the ashes of her dead brother. It seems she is poised at the beginning of her speech, ready to move forward into a long lament for Orestes, but she is also frozen in time: standing still like a statue in its niche, she is draped in the sculptural folds of a Greek garment and framed by the columns of the doorway. The strangely enigmatic, silent pose of this portrait hints at something hidden and unknown that will not be revealed, like the contents of the urn that will turn out to be empty. Thus Case is 122

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3.2 Janet Case as Electra. “Greek Plays at the Universities, by a Graduate of Girton,” The Woman’s World 1 (1888): 128.

identified with Electra and Electra identified with Case, to produce a doubled figure for melancholy identification with ancient Greek; her role is to hold the urn of a dead language, bearing the ashes of words that may never be revived. This was precisely the appeal of performing Greek tragedy at women’s colleges like Girton, to experience the strangeness of Greek without translating it into English. But there were other forms of translation at work in Girton’s Electra as words were transposed into poses, gestures, and music, and transformed into a visual spectacle that could be recognized even by members of the audience who did not know Greek. What was being performed was a certain relation to knowledge as much as knowledge itself, at a time when women were eager to claim their place in higher education. The previous decade had been an important turning point in the formation of women’s colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, with Girton College starting as early as 1869 and Smith College founded in 1875. These colleges communicated actively with each other in the following decades to define their institutional identities, creating a network for exchange of anecdotes and reports on activities, both curricular and extracurricular. The success of Girton’s Electra in 1883 influenced the decision to perform Electra at Smith in 1889, although the presentation and re-presentation of these two student productions played out in different cultural contexts. Drawing on research in the archives of both colleges, I consider their Electras in The Education of Electra

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relation to debates about the education of women in nineteenth-century England and America, emphasizing the collegiate community and transatlantic communication that made it desirable for women to memorize and recite a dead language.

Electra at Girton College The first issue of The Woman’s World (originally entitled The Lady’s World and edited by Oscar Wilde) includes a fine specimen of Ladies’ Greek: an illustration of the female chorus for Sophocles’ Electra, in an article entitled “Greek Plays at the Universities, by a Graduate of Girton” (Figure 3.3). The anonymous “Graduate of Girton” was in fact Janet Case herself, writing that “the representation of Greek plays before English audiences has lately become so common that one not unnaturally seeks some justification for it.”10 It had become all the rage to re-present Greek tragedy in ancient Greek, reviving a dead language by presenting it on stage in the present moment of performance. The article admits this strange presentation may be of less interest “to those who have no knowledge of Greek life and thought,” or “to the classic” whose knowledge of Greek is satisfied only insofar as “the representation is or is not the realization of his conception.” Rather it is the student actors who find such performances “intensely interesting” because they achieve “clearer insight into the meaning of the play” by being inside the play. Somewhere between not knowing Greek at all and knowing it too well, performing Greek is an exercise in classical literacy that “wakes still more lively interest in the reading of other plays.” What matters in the revival of Greek plays is the perpetuation of “lively interest” in reading more Greek, making the theatrical performance less important than its pedagogical effect. The paragraph concludes: “As part then, of a University education, if on no other grounds, the acting of Greek plays seems amply justified.” While the article seeks to justify acting of Greek plays for general educational purposes, it also implies a more specific purpose. Collegiate productions in ancient Greek allowed women’s education to be justified at a time when it still needed justification: in the performance of Electra at Girton, college women could display their commitment to classical learning by literally enacting it. Thus “A Group from the Electra” is featured first in the article, illustrating members of the chorus as representatives of the collective student body of Girton College. Artfully arranged, this group of women is simultaneously acting in the play and contemplating the action, as if they are reflecting on their own claim to classical literacy. In addition to performing Greek tragedy in Greek, they embody the spectacle of women performing Greek tragedy in Greek: their 124

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3.3 “Greek Plays at the Universities,” The Woman’s World 1 (December 1888): 121.

production of Electra justifies the education of Electra (and vice versa). So too, the reader is invited to reflect on this production as a self-conscious moment of classical reception of, by, and for women. When Electra was performed in 1883 at Girton, it had been reported in various newspapers as a pedagogical success that justified women’s classical education. A brief notice in The Times, for example, saw the play as part of a longer history in the higher education of women: The Education of Electra

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When Macaulay chivalrously excused Miss Aikin’s want of classical knowledge as “very pardonable in a lady,” he could not have foreseen that within 40 years a college for women in his own University would attempt, and that with creditable success, the performance of a Greek tragedy. The students of Girton have produced the Electra of Sophocles in a manner which not only bears testimony to their taste and ingenuity, but says much for their knowledge of the particular play they had selected, and of the spirit of the Greek drama in general. The gymnasium of the college had been fitted up as a temporary theatre, and  .  .  . the music of the choruses was adapted from Mendelssohn’s Antigone. The entire arrangements were planned by the students, and the costumes were designed and made by themselves. The performance was, on the whole, so respectable that it seems hardly fair to point out such slight blemishes as a few false quantities, which were doubtless merely the effect of temporary nervousness. Indeed the Greek was throughout clearly and well declaimed.11 Although the recitation with “a few false quantities” retained the traces of “Lady’s Greek, without the accents,” the Girton Electra demonstrated how much progress had been made, from one woman’s “want of classical knowledge” to many women wanting classical knowledge. A more detailed review in Pictorial World began with a similar announcement: “It is with great pleasure that we hear that the study of classics is gaining ground among women students. Our latest news from Girton College brings us an account of the performance of a Greek play, the Elektra of Sophokles being wisely chosen both on account of its classical merit and also because it is one of the few Greek plays in which the chorus is composed of women.”12 Refuting “those who fear that the ‘higher education’ of women is too great a strain on their physical powers,” the reviewer went on to congratulate “the founders of Girton College on their loyalty to the established course of study in Cambridge, the much abused ‘Little-Go’ rendering some knowledge of the Greek language essential.” The chorus was praised for rendering this essential knowledge of Greek in dramatic form, making it audible and visible to the audience: The chorus, always the most characteristic feature in a Greek play, was singularly well represented, and we have seldom seen a more graceful group of girls than these Grecian maidens; their measured rhythmic movements and sympathetic chant sometimes rising to a tragic wail, then again sinking to a low monotonous dirge, or uplifted joyfully in 126

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celebration of Orestes’ return, accorded well, and gave emphasis to all the incidents of this thrilling play. However the most thrilling performance of “this thrilling play” was the student who played Electra: The whole interest of the plot centred round the heroine, Elektra, and all merit is due to this student, both for her admirable acting and also for her conception of this most complex character. A tragic part is always the most difficult for an amateur actor to undertake, and we can hardly praise too highly the pathetic lament of Elektra over the supposed ashes of Orestes. In the role of Electra, Janet Case demonstrated that it was possible for a “student” and “amateur actor” to turn an essential knowledge of Greek into the essentials of a dramatic performance. For this reviewer, “the pathetic lament of Elektra” had particular pathos, not only as a measure of the present success in educating women but as a measure of its past difficulty. The review therefore concluded with another general reflection on the classical education of women: “We trust that this most successful attempt to revive interest in the Greek drama will do much to promote the knowledge of classical life and literature amongst women, to whom such studies have been for so long a forbidden delight.” While all the reviews agreed that Electra was the star, what was especially significant about the Girton Electra was a new claim to classical knowledge through the collective performance of Ladies’ Greek, as observed by The Academy: That a number of women-students should have been found capable of committing to memory several hundred lines of Greek verse is not now remarkable; but that one small college, entirely without extraneous help, should carry out every detail so correctly, and with such a genuine appreciation of the spirit of the play, is indeed remarkable, and shows a high standard and wide attainment in classical knowledge.13 Beyond the impressive performance of Janet Case, the play demonstrated how Greek letters might be impressed upon women not only to mark an individual female character, but also to define the remarkable character of the college as a whole. Girton was distinctive in insisting on examination in Greek (the “Little-Go”) as a necessary qualification for women entering the college, The Education of Electra

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making their educational philosophy both more radical and more conservative than Newnham College, where there was greater flexibility to qualify through modern languages. Not only did girls have to struggle through classical languages for admission to Girton, but starting in 1881, the women students who chose to continue were encouraged to sit for the Classical Tripos examinations along with the men students at Cambridge University.14 Although they could not yet receive university degrees, they attended lectures and received private supervisions from selected Cambridge dons who were willing to be associated with the college to confirm “a high standard and wide attainment in classical knowledge,” albeit not yet on a par with the men. The college liked to characterize itself through classical studies in particular, notwithstanding the fact that most of the Girton girls studied other subjects. An 1882 entry in The Girton Review proclaimed that “the advantages to be derived from the study of Classics are patent to every eye,” but also complained that “it cannot be denied that the Classical Tripos has drawbacks, which particularly affect Girtonians.” The new regulations for the Classical Tripos, dividing it into two parts that emphasized linguistic before literary skills, made it even more difficult for women to compete with the men: The chief candidates for honours in Classics are young men who for the most part come up from some public school, where they have for the last six years been studying little else but Classics, where they have become better acquainted with the Greek and Latin grammars than with their own, and have mastered to some extent the (to the uninitiated) mysteries of Greek and Latin prose and verse. It is with a view to candidates such as these that the Classical Tripos has been arranged, and it is with candidates such as these that the Girton students have to compete. How little fitted they are as a rule to enter upon such a competition will be easily understood by any one who knows how low a place the Classical studies, which are exalted so high in our boys’ schools, hold in the similar institutions for girls.15 For girls “uninitiated” into the mysteries of prose and verse composition, the first part of the Tripos was especially challenging. Reading ancient Greek already seemed mysterious, and girls were even more mystified by composing verse in ancient Greek (another version of “Lady’s Greek, without the accents”). So, according to The Girton Review, “a girl coming up from a High School, with the usual small allowance of Latin and utter ignorance of Greek, will find herself, at the end of three years’ hard and discouraging work, in the position 128

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she ought to have been in when starting her work for the Tripos.” But no matter how discouraged a girl might become, the students at Girton were encouraged to go through this rite of passage: “Nevertheless, we would not urge any one, however ill-prepared, to give up the Classical Tripos if she felt that the work, however hard, would give her the pleasure that she could derive from no other study, and that, however low a place she might obtain in the Tripos list, she would gain infinitely in breadth of mind and knowledge of literature.” The very attempt to acquire classical literacy, regardless of its success, could transform any girl into a real Woman of Letters. The presentation of Electra was therefore praised in The Spectator as a justifiable attempt to represent women’s education, not only for publicity in newspapers that reached the world beyond Cambridge, but for the benefit of the university community: The Electra of Sophocles was performed last week at Girton by the students of the College, with a success which certainly justified the attempt. The play was selected as being one of the few really good ones containing a chorus of maidens, and the whole representation was given with felicity, grace, and considerable artistic power. The ladies’ Greek, especially, received deserved and high encomiums from the Cambridge Dons and members of the council, who were the only gentle-men permitted to be present.16 “Felicity” may not seem the best description of a tragedy itself dominated by lamentation and loss, not to mention matricide, but it describes how much was gained by the performance of the tragedy at Cambridge: it was a felicitous demonstration of “the ladies’ Greek,” recited by ladies according to the standards of the gentlemen who were present. Their performance was especially for the benefit of the dons, to prove that women were able to perform at the highest level of classical education, if not at the highest level of academic examination. Among the gentlemen present was Professor of Classics J. P. Postgate, who had been teaching Janet Case and some of the other girls at Girton. After the play, he sent a letter of praise directly to the head of college, albeit with a familiar professorial nudge: “You must please convey my best thanks and congratulations to Electra who I think even outdid herself. Perhaps, having found her tongue in Greek Verse again, she may be persuaded to continue its practice with a view to the Examination which Electras have to undergo in the present day.”17 Thus the production of Electra justified the ongoing education of all Electras at Girton. The Education of Electra

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Janet Case proved an exemplary Electra, who was honored for her performance with a book inscribed with a dedication that made her synonymous with the role: To ΗΛΕΚΤΡΑ In memory of our own great Pleasure in seeing her act The part in the ΗΛΕΚΤΡΑ At Girton. November 24th, 1883.18 Having completed Part I of the Classical Tripos in 1883, Case went on to place in the First Division for Part II of the Classical Tripos in 1885, paving the way for the famous Agnata Ramsey who achieved top honors in Classics in 1887. Ramsay’s success was made possible by the creation of a collegiate culture for classical studies at Girton, and Case had played an active role in this cultivation of classics for women during her years at the college. Together with Alice Zimmern (the chorus leader in the Girton Electra), she formed a Classical Club, announced in The Girton Review of 1883 “under the joint presidentship of J. E. Case and A. Zimmern with a view to promoting acquaintance and mutual help among the classical students.” Over the next two years the club met regularly “in J. E. Case’s room” for reading and discussion of classical texts, and Greek tragedy in particular: the performance of Electra encouraged them to go on to read in other plays by Sophocles (Oedipus, Antigone, Trachiniae) and also the Alcestis of Euripides.19 Her performance of Electra led to the invitation to play the role of Athena in 1885, as the only woman to appear in the Cambridge Greek Play, and for the rest of her life she was identified with these two roles, not only within the university but also when she moved to London. There it was reported that the artist Henry Holliday “said, when living at Hampstead, that he would learn Greek if he could find a lady like ‘Athena or Electra’, and he was much surprised to find she lived on the Heath, close by. So he became one of Miss Case’s pupils.”20 And when Case died in 1937, The Girton Review again remembered “the very ambitious” staging of Electra from more than fifty years ago, where “Janet was a most moving Electra.”21 More than a memorable moment in the life of Janet Case, the performance of Electra proved an important turning point in the life of the college. Reporting on activities for the fall term of 1883, The Girton Review gave a detailed description of preparations for the play and “the effect on the life of the college,” reporting that “all time, thought, and energy that could be spared from work have been devoted to the Elektra, and all societies, tennis, etc., have held but a 130

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subordinate position in our thoughts.”22 Many students not directly involved in the play worked for its success, with rehearsals occupying the time after lunch and dinner, and nine o-clock tea-parties dedicated to making costumes. During the last week students set aside their Greek-English dictionaries to work around the clock, as “ ‘Liddell and Scott’ gave way to sewing machines,” and former students returned to lend a “practiced hand in the mysterious process of putting on Greek dresses and adjusting drapery.” The design of the Greek costumes had an effect on the fancy-dress balls at Girton as well, where some students appeared “in dresses constructed on strictly Greek principles,” though not without complication: “why the Greeks should have been particularly partial to garments with no beginning and no end, and nothing particular to start from in the process of getting in them, we could never quite understand.”23 To make sure everyone understood the construction of costumes on strictly Greek principles, Janet Case corresponded with Charles Newton, professor of archaeology at University College London and keeper of antiquities at the British Museum. In a letter addressed to Janet Case, he confirmed with archaeological precision that “the cloak of the men should be fastened on one shoulder by a circular broach, in the form of a slightly convex button about the size of a florin. This had better be gilt. This would be appropriate for the cloak of Orestes and Pylades supposing them to be dressed like the horsemen on the frieze of the Parthenon.” For Chrysothemis and Clytemnestra he saw “no objection to necklaces of colored beads, but mock pearls may also be used,” but he insisted that props be made to look authentic, especially the knife for killing Clytemnestra. “The knife of which you sent me a sketch might do but the form is not Greek nor even classical. You will find better types in . . . Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities.”24 The visualization of the play became a pedagogical exercise for the entire college, as a collective student labor that would turn Electra into an archaeologically correct “archaic” performance based on careful study in libraries and museums. As reported in The Girton Review, students “discussed schemes of colour, and consulted authorities in the British Museum in order to ensure the correctness of the dresses and stage accessories,” and they commissioned Mary Sargent to design a set inspired by the ruins of Mycenae: “An artist, sister of one of one the students, who has made a special study of Greek architecture, painted the scenery, every detail of which she got from works of reference in the public libraries of Paris.”25 The design for the set and costumes served to “translate” the tragedy for the students participating in the performance as well as for the audience attending it: for those who did not know ancient Greek verbatim (and how many did?), The Education of Electra

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a picture could speak a thousand words. Adopting the “authentic” transliteration of Greek names (as listed in the playbill), The Girton Review described a self-consciously archaic production that created the effect of knowing Greek by means of a visual spectacle: It was decided to use the gymnasium as a theatre, and the building was quite transformed from its familiar aspect; the walls were hung with curtains of subdued coloring, unsightly beams were hidden, and raised seats gave all the audience a good view of the performance. On the lower chorus-stage stood the thymele, garlanded with bay-leaves. When the curtain rose, the upper stage was seen, with the palace of Agamemnon, and a street of Mukenai in the background; and on the right a small altar, whereon, in one of the prettiest scenes in the play, Klutaimnestra offered fruits after her prayer to Apollo. On the left of the stage was the Gate of Lions, whence on this occasion came forth the chorus of maidens of Mukenai. . . . The dresses were in nearly all respects very well arranged, the colouring was varied and harmonious, and it was a happy thought to put the chorus in white robes, relieved by borders of gold and colours, while variety was obtained by different methods of arranging the folds. Klutaimnestra’s yellow robe was very queenly, and everyone was struck by the picture made when she passed through the doorway, the curtain being held back by the white robed attendant. The exquisite yellow-green of Chrusothemis’ dress would have shewn to greater advantage in a Greek theatre under the blue sky than by lamp-light, but even under disadvantageous conditions it was a lovely bit of colouring. The play abounded in effective pictures so that those who could only follow the general course of events had always some interest.26 The play transformed a “familiar” college setting into something strange and unfamiliar, yet the creation of this pictorial effect—in “prettiest scenes” and “effective pictures”—also made it possible for the audience to see the Greek tragedy without having to read the script. A photograph shows the architectural framing of the set, with columns painted in Mycenean patterns and actors draped in classical folds like Greek statuary (Figure 3.4). Drawing on Victorian conventions of the tableau in the theater as well as archaeological reconstructions of antiquity in the museum, the semiotics of the scene would be familiar to nineteenth-century viewers. Electra occupies the space in front of the door (signifying the feminine world of the palace) while Orestes has arrived through the entrance (signifying the 132

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3.4 Photograph of Electra and Orestes and cast from the 1883 production of Electra at Girton College. GCPH 11/7/1/23. With permission from The Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge.

masculine world beyond the palace). Dressed in dark robes and placed in the middle of the stage, they are easily identified as the central actors, in contrast to the chorus dressed in white and artfully arranged in sculptural groupings on each side of the stage. The chorus to the right of Electra leans forward in sympathy, while Pylades stands by to the left of Orestes; they are witnesses to this moment just before the recognition and reunion of brother and sister, as Electra kneels before the urn that is supposed to contain the ashes of Orestes, and he reaches down with his hand toward hers. This scene with the urn was considered most impressive, according to The Girton Review: The best scene of the whole play is that in which Elektra mourns over the urn containing, as she believes, the ashes of Orestes. Pulades with difficulty restrains Orestes for some time from revealing himself, and when he finally does so, the face of Elektra changes from despair to wild joy. Even those who could not understand the recitation of the speeches in ancient Greek were able to read the scene, as Electra made the language move (and moving) through different emotions written on her face. For this reason, the Girton Electra did not adopt the use of Greek masks. For all its claims to authenticity in language and costumes and props and set design, The Education of Electra

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the success of the play depended on acting out expressively the impression left by ancient Greek. This was especially true of the urn scene. Professor Jebb (who lectured regularly to women at Cambridge, whose American wife Caroline Jebb was named to succeed Janet Case as President of the Classical Club at Girton, and whose reading of Electra was an important subtext for Girton’s performance) singled out Electra with the urn as a passage “of exquisite art and beauty,” in which Electra “utters a most touching lament”; according to Jebb, it is because of “the irresistible pathos of her lament” that Orestes is overcome with emotion and finally reveals himself to her.27 Delivered by Orestes, the urn is an empty vessel that Electra fills with words. She begins her lament with an apostrophe to the object itself (1126: ὦ φιλτάτου μνημεῖον, “O memorial of my dearest,”) and then uses the object to address the brother she believes to be dead (1142: σμικρὸς προσήκεις ὄγκος ἐν σμικρῶι κύτει, “So you have come home, a little dust in a little jar”), and finally asks to dwell in death with him, imagining herself inside the urn as well (1165–1166: τοιγὰρ σὺ δέξαι μ’ ἐς τὸ σὸν τόδε στέγος, τὴν μηδέν εἰς τὸ μηδέν, “take me to your home, as nothing into nothing”). Thus she turns the urn from “nothing” into something significant, taking possession of the thing and desperately holding on to it. In the stichomythia with Orestes that follows her lament, Electra refuses to give back the urn (line1217: εἲπερ γ’ Ὀρέστου σῶμα βαστάζω τόδε, “this is the body of Orestes I hold”) until he tells her it is only a fiction (line 1218: ἀλλ’ οὐκ Ὀρέστου, πλὴν λόγωι γ’ ἠσκημένον, “this is not the body of Orestes, except as it is crafted in words”). As a theatrical prop, the urn becomes the focal point for Electra’s lament, allowing for the externalization of grief by projecting it into the interiority of the object. But it is also a metatheatrical prop, allowing the audience to reflect on the symbolic transfer of an object the contents of which remain unknown. The photograph of this scene at Girton shows Electra kneeling before the small urn, placed center stage; her lamentation turns the entire theater into another version of the urn, an empty container to fill up with words that are ambiguously brought to life in the performance of the play. This moment captures a critical turning point in the dramatic plot—the anagnorisis and peripeteia for the characters in the tragedy—that was also a critical moment of recognition for the spectators of the tragedy. In Electra, the women of Girton College learned to see a language that remained strange and unknown, creating an interiority that was difficult to decipher. While students at Girton tended to adopt Jebb’s reading of the play, they also sought to transform his instinct for expression, as they turned the language of classical scholarship into an expressive language that could translate their own impression of the Greek text. In reciting a dead language in female voices, the 134

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3.5 Photograph of Electra and Chrysothemis from the 1883 production of Electra at Girton College. GCPH 11/7/1/7. With permission from The Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge.

women of Girton called attention to the loss of the very language they were performing. Their gendered performance of mourning also produced new performances of gender in the Girton Electra. The scene between Electra and Chrysothemis, for example, juxtaposed two forms of femininity, with Electra actively instructing her more passive sister in the declamation of her speech in Greek (figure 3.5). The two sisters were clearly differentiated by costume, as described in The Pictorial Review: Chrusothemis formed a beautiful counterfoil to her sister Elektra, her sea-green garb making a pretty contrast with Elektra’s sombre, but graceful robes: the white diplos with black Greek border hanging in classic folds over the black kiton; their acting also brought out their different characters with good effect, as the timid retiring Chrusothemis conversed with Elektra, and was led by degrees to share her stronger sister’s stern and uncompromising fidelity to her father’s memory. In this “pretty contrast” of costume and gesture, the more masculine Electra played a more active role that contrasted with the more traditionally feminine The Education of Electra

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3.6 Photograph of Electra and Paidagogus from the 1883 production of Electra at Girton College. GCPH 11/7/1/11. With permission from The Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge.

Chrysothemis, waiting to be led by “her stronger sister.” Electra’s deictic pose suggests a scene of instruction, not only to dramatize “fidelity to her father’s memory” but to deliver a speech that is faithful to the Greek text of Sophocles. In another scene Electra struck a very different pose, no longer standing upright but kneeling down before the character of the Paidagogus (figure 3.6). In this scene, Electra recognizes the old man as the Paidagogus who has raised Orestes and masterminded the return to the palace. In the absence of her own long-lost father, she addresses the Paidagogus as another father (line 1361: χαῖρ’, ὦ πάτερ· πατέρα γὰρ εἰσορᾶν δοκῶ, “Hail, father, for it is a father I seem to behold!). Within the context of this college performance, her submission to his paternal authority (somewhat awkwardly embodied by another student in Greek robes and a fuzzy beard) is another scene of instruction: it performs a pedagogical relation, enacting the desire of female students to submit to the authority of their Greek tutors. After all, the Girton Electra was staged not only for the women of the college, but also to prove to the few gentlemen in the audience (Cambridge dons and members of the council) that women could recite and perform ancient Greek: they defined their claim to female subjectivity by willingly subjecting themselves to the discipline of learning this difficult language. 136

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Yet in mediating between the page as a site of impression and the stage as a site of expression, the Girton women also turned the melancholy spectacle of Electra into a performance of their own interpretative authority: a spectacle of female classical literacy that reveals the Paidagogus to be a woman in drag. In surveying “Electra read by women” in the nineteenth century, Edith Hall has argued that “Sophocles’ Electra only came into her own when other women contemplated her in the nineteenth century. This era produced a new interest in female subjectivity going beyond hackneyed expressions of maternal and conjugal devotion.” Citing the Girton Electra in particular, Hall suggests that “the most importance evidence for the distinctive contribution to be made by women to the understanding of Electra comes from Girton College in 1883” and she concludes that “the choice of play was determined by the strong roles for three women, and the female identity of the chorus.”28 It is possible to see the characters of Electra, Chrysothemis, and Clytemnestra redefining the roles a woman could play in the nineteenth century, and the chorus of unmarried maidens representing a new generation of independent women; indeed the chorus included Margaret Llewelyn Davis, who later joined the Women’s Cooperative Guild and the National Union of Suffrage Societies, and Janet Case also became a strong supporter of women’s rights. But if a new interest in female subjectivity produced identification of and with strong female characters in Electra, the performance at Girton also produced other modes of identification. The understanding of Electra that came from Girton College was more Victorian than our modern readings of the tragedy; what was at stake in their reclamation of Electra was less a claim to a feminist voice or female subjectivity than an embodiment of the Greek text by and for a collective student body that sought to commemorate itself by identifying with dead Greek letters.

Electra at Smith College News of Electra performed at Girton College traveled fast, not only in newspaper reports but in various personal accounts including diaries, letters, and memoirs that were circulating on both sides of the Atlantic. Alice Longfellow, for example, was sent by her famous father from Cambridge in America to Cambridge in England, where she spent a year at Newnham College before returning to help with the conversion of the Harvard Annex into Radcliffe College for Women. In her daily journal, she recorded several evenings of reading Electra aloud in rooms at Newnham, followed by a trip to Girton to see the play: The Education of Electra

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In the evening all Newnham went in two omnibuses to Girton Hall to see the “Electra.” It was a most successful performance, very prettily managed, all done by the students. The costumes were excellent, & the chorus looked charmingly, especially when they wound gracefully in & out singing the choruses. Electra was really good & looked finely, & graceful & strong. Clytemnestra was next best, & the others rather stiff. There was great applause, but Miss Bernard would not allow them to appear before the curtain. The performance was in the gymnasium.29 The last sentence deflates the idealized descriptions of the Girton Electra in the popular press: alongside the impressive figure of Electra who “looked finely” the other actors looked “rather stiff,” and we are reminded that the Mycenaean palace was actually in the mundane space of the gymnasium, a partially covered area with an adjoining yard that is now part of the college kitchen. But even if the performance of the Girton Electra was not “great,” either in scale or in quality, it received “great applause” as a semiprivate occasion that proved to be an important public event: a turning point in the history of women’s education, and a precursor to the performance of Electra at Smith College, six years later in 1889. Throughout the 1880s women’s colleges on both sides of the Atlantic were in communication with each other to establish a new sense of collegiate identity, to circulate ideas about women’s education, and to establish credibility and legitimacy by comparison with other women’s colleges.30 A steady stream of American women flowed into Cambridge to study Greek at Newnham and Girton, including Helen Magill White (who arrived at Newnham College to study Greek in 1879) and Emily James Smith Putnam (who arrived from Bryn Mawr to study Greek at Girton in 1889, and later became dean of Barnard College). Meanwhile Girton and Newnham also sent a good number of their British students to learn and teach classics in America, such as Gertrude Hirst (who went on from Newnham to study Greek at Columbia University, and became professor at Barnard) and Emily France Wright (who went on from Girton to receive a Ph.D. in Greek at Chicago, and became professor at Bryn Mawr College).31 In this transatlantic exchange of students between Cambridge and the Seven Sisters, the cultural prestige of Greek studies in particular served to justify the higher education of women. The Girton Review began to publish “InterCollegiate Letters” with a Greek epigraph from Euripides: γυναῖκές ἐσμεν φιλόφρον ἀλλήλαις γένος (Iph. Taur. 1061: “Women are we, a group friendly to each other”). Addressed by Iphigeneia to a chorus of exiled Greek women, asking for help, this line suggests a common mission and identifiable community for women who sought access to education in the nineteenth century. Women 138

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from other colleges in England and America were invited to contribute to this regular column, as a space to narrate their academic activities, under a rubric that presumed (of course) a knowledge of and desire for ancient Greek. The appeal to shared interest was made without translating the Greek into English, allowing the line to be interpreted in different ways for the creation of a collective female character imprinted with Greek letters. One of the American colleges responding to this invitation from The Girton Review was Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Formed in 1875 with funds from Sophia Smith, Smith College claimed the Greek wisdom implicit in the name of their donor and adopted a biblical motto in Greek: ἐν τῆι αρετῆι τὴν γνῶσιν (“to virtue knowledge”). To distinguish itself from other female colleges and define a higher academic purpose, the college created three courses of study, “the classical, the literary, and the scientific,” and the Smith students proudly proclaimed in their letter to Girton that “the entrance requirements for the regular or classical course, we understand, are about the same as Girton, and our courses in Greek and Latin are similar.” In addition to describing their curriculum, the letter reported extracurricular activities such as “The Alpha Society,” the purpose of which was “to add a distinctly literary element to our inside life, to keep up an interest in the affairs of the outside world, to bring to light the best papers written by the girls.” The first letter of the Greek alphabet identified their literary character with classical literacy, making them perhaps more beautiful on the inside than the outside: “We are not beautiful, as a whole, it must be confessed; but most of the girls have alert, intelligent faces that are much more attractive than mere passive beauty; for there is a spirit of earnestness in the College life, and a high moral tone that suggests the womanliness that characterizes our best girls.”32 Just as the women at Girton received reports from Smith, so too the women at Smith received reports from Girton, and it is in this transatlantic context that we should understand their decision to perform Electra in Greek at Smith College in 1889. As a celebration of the graduating class, this performance demonstrated Smith’s ambition to be taken as seriously as Girton, insisting on ancient Greek as the appropriate model and measure of higher education for women. In the fall of 1888, the senior class approached the head of the Department of Greek, Professor Henry Mather Tyler, who began his career as a classical scholar at Amherst College and later became the first dean of Smith College. He was fondly remembered, years later, by his students: To the many who studied under him Greek was not a dead language, but a wellspring of culture. Homer, Xenophon, Plato and Demosthenes The Education of Electra

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in his courses long held a lead place in Smith College training, and the inspiration of the tragedies and the lyric poets, as Professor Tyler taught them, will not be forgotten. Those who know him as a class-officer, or in the later years, as College dean, found in him a wise, kindly adviser and valued the influence of a man truly καλὸς κἀγαθός, a gentleman and a scholar.33 Professor Tyler had been present for the early debates about requirements for admission and regulation of studies at Smith College. In response to questions of “whether it would be advisable to demand that young women should be trained in Greek,” he believed that women should be educated according to the same principles as their male counterparts: “An educated man should have strength and beauty in the sanctuary of his inner life. Both discipline and culture should therefore be sought in his training.”34 Likewise, to give the educated woman “strength and beauty” in the sanctuary of their college, he encouraged them to seek out both “discipline and culture” through their Greek studies. Tyler therefore agreed to coach the graduating class for a performance of Electra in ancient Greek, the first production of its kind at a women’s college in America. A detailed description was published in A Greek Play and Its Presentation (1891), with a literary essay on Greek tragedy by Tyler. He prepared this slim, decorative volume to offer “some account of our experiment at Smith College with a Greek play,” not only as “a matter of interest to the students and to the friends of the college to hear the story of what we attempted, and how and why we did it,” but also for “helping the public to a better appreciation of Greek poetry and in encouraging classical study.”35 Like Jebb, Tyler was a man of letters who believed in making classical literacy accessible to a broader range of readers; indeed, Jebb’s edition of Electra had been reprinted in America in a modified edition, making the play a popular text to study in the curriculum of American schools and colleges.36 But reading the Greek text in the classroom was not enough for Tyler. In order to combine classical discipline with the culture of classics, he insisted on the cultivation of another kind of reading: To gain an appreciation of the artistic elements of a Greek play, to feel its impression in its entireness so as to be able to understand at all what it is as a work of art, is almost an impossibility for the student as the result of any ordinary lecture-room methods. The usual study of the college or university is analytical and critical. This needs to be supplemented by something which shall bring out the unified impression of the play. To 140

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3.7 Scene from Electra, Senior Dramatics, Smith College, 1889. Creator unknown. College Archives, Smith College (Northampton, MA).

put the drama on the stage is of course the best method for shewing its highest qualities, and to bring the student into a thorough appreciation of the poet.37 Much as Jebb had inspired the women at Girton to translate their impression of Greek into an expressive performance, Tyler used the language of impression and expression, encouraging the women of Smith to perform the Greek play in order to “feel its impression in its entireness.” The frontispiece for A Greek Play and Its Presentation gives a unified impression of the play, in a photograph that shows nearly the entire cast on stage (figure 3.7). In this photograph, the chorus is clustered in the foreground while Electra, dressed in black, stands further in the center background: she is pointing into the palace door but looking back at the Paidagogus, standing to her right. In fact, all the faces are turned toward the Paidagogus, who was acted by one of the students but seems to stand in here for the pedagogical figure of Tyler himself. The frontispiece, placed next to the title page with the name of “Henry M. Tyler, Professor of Greek in Smith College,” turns him into the “author” of the production. He had led the students through several months of rigorous training during the winter term of 1889, when the study of the play became a daily college exercise, focusing on classroom methods for comprehension of The Education of Electra

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3.8 Musical score for Third Ode of Electra, Smith College, 1889. In Henry Tyler, A Greek Play and Its Presentation (Springfield, MA: Clark W. Bryan, 1891), 61.

the play and lessons in the pronunciation of ancient Greek. But he was not the only one who trained the students, as Henry Sargent (who had directed Oedipus at Harvard in 1881) took over the directing of the play during the spring term: nine week of rehearsals in the college gymnasium, where students did physical exercises and learned various forms of classical poses and statuesque movement, carefully choreographed with music for the choral odes. Unlike the Girton Electra, which had recycled music from Mendelssohn’s Antigone as prelude and interludes for the recitation of Greek, the choral odes at Smith College integrated Greek text into a musical setting. The chorus sang with music especially composed for the performance by Dr. Benjamin Blodgett, director of music at the college, and his choral settings were published in their entirety as an appendix to A Greek Play and Its Presentation. The first choral ode sounded like an American Methodist hymn, to suggest a solemn religious performance, while other odes struck a more exotic note to suggest ancient Greek modes and melodies, such as a (pseudo)Dorian scale or a stately marching rhythm as the chorus moved slowly in time with the music (figure 3.8). Thus the women at Smith were trained not only to memorize the Greek text 142

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but to transpose its metrical movement on the page into the musical motion of bodies on stage. According to Tyler, “Perhaps nothing in the whole course of this undertaking was more difficult to these American girls than the calm and smoothly gliding step by which they sought to gain the statuesque movement of the Greeks.” In directing the play, he insisted that “all movements were to be deliberate, easy and natural, so as to give no impression of haste, but that the action might appear statuesque, consisting of a succession of strong suggestive attitudes.”38 The succession of “statuesque” movements could be recognized within a longer tradition of women striking poses inspired by Greek statuary and vase painting, famously associated with the classical “attitudes” of Emma Hamilton in eighteenth-century century England, and also with the classical acting methods of François Delsarte in nineteenth-century century France. In the 1880s American Delsartism was popularized by performers and teachers, who cultivated Delsartean principles in recitation and elocution as well as nonverbal performance genres such as statue posing, tableaux, pantomime, aesthetic gymnastics, and dance drama. The publication of Delsarte System of Expression in 1885 by Genevieve Stebbins was especially influential for the students at Smith College, as they embraced her aesthetic philosophy for physical training and expressive moment based on pictures of Greek and Roman statues. Stebbins instructed readers of her book first to “study the poise and attitudes of these statues” and “stand in front of a large mirror and attempt to make yourself a living duplicate of the picture”; then, several poses should be combined into a sequence, so that “wherever a series of statues is gone through, one form must gradually melt into the other” in order to create “rhythm of movement in harmony with character of statue or emotion depicted.”39 Thus the body was trained to achieve an ideal pose, momentarily arrested in time, before moving to the next pose. Rather than literally translating Greek into English, the Smith Electra drew on this Delsarte tradition to perform a different kind of translation: the actors and especially the chorus translated the impression of Greek into expressive movement, mobilizing Greek letters as an embodied spectacle of classical literacy. The effect was described in The Springfield Republican: The spectacle of the chorus was singularly attractive and lovely; the maidens in their Greek raiment and filleted hair, moving like poetry itself, and led by a sweet and strong-voiced choryphaeus, in the person of Miss Tilton, made the stage a delight to look at. . . . The beauty of the Greek garb was charmingly illustrated in light tints of blue, yellow, browns, drabs, The Education of Electra

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lavenders; and the girls managed their robes with perfect grace and skill, and too much praise cannot be given to the fine artistic motions and groupings of the maidens, forming a subject for the painter of the poet in every phase.40 A review in The Literary World also ended with praise for the chorus: The chorus entering, encircled the altar with wreaths; constantly, in every pause of action, the coryphaeus fed the flame or poured fresh libations; in the passion of their grief the choreutae surrounded the altar, and leaned, sobbing, against it. Students of Greek must have been impressed by the accuracy with which these varied relations were suggested by the rendering of the choruses by the Smith College students, and unclassical spectators could not fail to notice the intense sympathy with Elektra which pervaded the whole chorus, and the responsiveness which characterized Miss Tilton’s admirable rendering of the difficult part of the coryphaeus. . . . The scenic effect of the chorus is in fact, one of the points in which the Smith College representation, as compared with the performance in Cambridge of the Oedipus Tyrannus, showed distinct advance in aesthetic character while losing nothing in scholarly value.41 These choruses of praise were reprinted at the end of Tyler’s book, as the final word in and on A Greek Play and Its Presentation. Both reviews emphasized that women might perform even more successfully than men, not only to define the “aesthetic character” of Greek tragedy but to define their own aesthetic of female character. A photograph of the chorus shows the women of Smith College, in a decorative display of highly aestheticized and Hellenized female character (figure 3.9). The women are grouped like statues around the choryphaeus, Mary Susie Tilton, who led them through the intricate song and dance of the play, choreographed to make Greek letters visible and audible in the theater. For Tyler, who liked to invoke Aristotle’s definition of Greek tragedy as “a process of educating the human soul” (13), this choreography served both a philosophical and a pedagogical purpose, since (according to Tyler) the Greek spirit “naturally embodied itself ” and “reached ever after perfection in the embodiment of its ideals” through discipline (9). The staging of Greek tragedy was another way to embody the spirit of classical Greece at a women’s college, which also aspired to the embodiment of its ideals through the disciplined education of women’s bodies and minds. Turning themselves into Women of Greek Letters, 144

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3.9 Chorus of Greek play Electra given by class of 1889. Creator unknown, College Archives, Smith College (Northampton, MA).

the students of Smith College deliberately imitated Girton College, but they did so within a different institutional structure that did not produce a singular exemplary figure; while “Electra” became the proper name for Case at Girton because she performed so brilliantly both in Electra and in the Classical Tripos, Smith College did not have an examination structure that would allow a single student to stand out with such remarkable results in Greek. Rather, the graduating seniors performed their collective desire for Greek, as part of a graduation exercise that was clearly framed by a choral performance of and for the class of 1889. For this reason, although the leading role of Electra was played with distinction by Alice Robbins Johnson, she did not become identified with the character in the same way as her counterpart, Janet Case, at Girton. Instead of standing out from the other students as an exceptional figure, Johnson was seen in relation to the other characters in the play. Thus she was photographed as Electra in a complementary pair with Mary Elizabeth Trow as Orestes, striking a Delsartean pose modeled on a classical sculpture in Rome (figure 3.10). The statue (first described as “Amicitia” but also known as “The Fraternal Greeting” or “Orestes and Electra,” and now generally as “Papirius and His Mother”) was popular in the nineteenth century in numerous illustrations and photographs, and could be readily recognized as a classical model for the reunion of brother The Education of Electra

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3.10 Pose of Electra with Orestes, Senior Dramatics, Electra, Smith College, 1889 (Alice Johnson as Electra and Mary Trow as Orestes). Creator: Katherine Elizabeth McClellan, College Archives, Smith College (Northampton, MA). Pose juxtaposed with photograph by James Anderson of Classical sculpture of Woman and Son (ca. 1845–1855), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

and sister within the play, and more generally for the close companionship of women at Smith College.42 But if the cross-gender identification of the pair (with Electra played by a woman but identified with a male figure in the statue, and Orestes played by a woman but identified with the female figure in the statue) hinted at the possibility of more intimate relations between women, The Springfield Republican seemed to ward off the implications of such genderbending: in their review, Johnson was praised for “the power of concentrated emotion” and “a striking countenance, framed in dark hair, and a rich contralto voice” while “the part of Orestes was ably taken, though of course without any counterfeit of mannishness, by Miss Trow.”43 What reviewers admired about the Smith Electra was its overall effect, produced by the students performing together as one collective body. The New York Tribune noted that “Miss Johnson’s acting was applauded several times by the audience; she was, perhaps, most effective in her lament over the urn 146

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3.11 “Dramatic Entertainment of the Senior Class.” Playbill for Electra, Smith College, 1889. In Henry Tyler, A Greek Play and Its Presentation (Springfield, MA: Clark W. Bryan, 1891), 53.

supposed to contain the ashes of Orestes,” but the reviewer hastened to add that “Miss Colgan, in her impersonation of Clytaemnestra, divided the honors with Miss Johnson” and further emphasized that “the most effective feature was the chorus” beyond any individual actors: “The artistic blending of colors, the rhythmic motion and graceful gestures all charmed the eye, while the stately music at the crisis of the tragedy interpreted the emotion that had grown too intense for speech.”44 The blending of colors also blended individual characters into the effect of the whole. Going beyond the limit of Electra’s expressive powers, the tragedy impressed the audience with a strange language “too intense for speech”; the dramatic power of the performance came from the movement and music rather than the ancient Greek words, which probably remained unknown to its auditors and perhaps to some of the actors as well. Even more than the chorus at Girton College, the choral performance by women at Smith College thus took center stage. The central role of the chorus is clear from the playbill for “Dramatic Entertainment of the Senior Class,” decorated with female figures reaching out to each other in a succession of classical poses (figure 3.11). This playbill was reproduced in A Greek Play and Its Presentation to show how the play created representative figures, allowing the women of the graduating class to be identified with the chorus rather than with any individual actor. Indeed, the book was published by Tyler to reiterate this relationship between the play’s presentation at the college and its representation of the college, not only for the students who participated in the play but for later generations of students as well. The publication of the book, or so he hoped, would make it possible for posterity to read and translate the Greek play into the future of the college. The Education of Electra

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In addition to the publication of Tyler’s book and various newspaper reports and reviews, there is another representation of the senior play made by the students themselves as a souvenir of their performance: an album with yellowing pages handwritten in fading pen and ink, with beautiful watercolor illustrations (figure 3.12a). It is a remarkable historical document and a work of art, carefully prepared to record details of the performance before, during and after the event. The front cover of the Electra Album depicts an opening scene especially designed for the Smith Electra, when a “priestess” came on stage with two attendants to pour a ceremonial libation and light the fire on the altar. Performed without words, this prelude set the scene for the revival of the Greek tragedy (rekindling the fire, as it were). The album also includes a brief handwritten essay entitled “Dramatic Action,” articulating general principles for performance, including directions for Delsartean movement that show the influence of Genevieve Stebbins: “There should be little of the modern gesturing. The action should be statuesque, consisting of a succession of strong, suggestive attitudes, each one to be held until gradually resolved into the other. The heroic spirit and noble blood should be evident in the lofty, self-reliant, self-respectful bearing.” The “heroic spirit” of the play was thus translated into the bearing of the students, taught to be “lofty, self-reliant, self-respectful” in the self-classicizing performance of their senior class. Inside the album, more illustrations—based on black and white photographs from the performance, but painted in water-color to render them more vivid—show different configurations of actors in Delsartean poses: the Paigagogus addressing Clytemnestra with two attendants, Electra extending her arm to Chrysothemis, and Orestes dramatically pointing his dagger to prepare for the matricide (figure 3.12). The costumes are carefully colored in each of these drawings, along with notes on costume design and specific instructions for gestures. In addition, the album does a careful description of choreography, with positions of the chorus members diagrammed in patterns on the page in elaborate detail, as they must have been on stage. An essay entitled “General Directions for the Chorus,” explains how the notations were used to develop choral movement: To facilitate the learning of the choral movement a square was drawn on the lower stage, about the altar. This was divided into twenty-five small squares, all of which were lettered. At every change of position, each member of the chorus noted the letter of the square upon which she was standing and the stage manager took down the general outline of the figure formed. Each new figure was called a tableau and was numbered. 148

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3.12 Four pages from Electra Album, Smith College. Title page, “The Electra at Smith College,” 1889 Senior Dramatics. Watercolor of three women and man from Electra, 1889 Senior Dramatics. Watercolor of two women from Electra, 1889 Senior Dramatics. Watercolor of two men, one with dagger, from Electra, 1889 Senior Dramatics. College Archives, Smith College (Northampton, MA).

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The “lettering” of squares occupied by each chorus member is another mode of translation, turning Greek letters on the page into movements on the stage. The Electra Album thus presents the performance not as script for recitation, but as a transcript of notes for the stage set and the props and the costumes and the choreography and other forms of visual representation. These notations were laboriously copied out in an exquisite hand by the president of the senior class, Ella Scribner, fittingly named the scribe for the album, who sent a letter to the class of ’89 after graduation, promising “to write up the Electra. At last the promise has been redeemed and a detailed account of our play lies in the college archives.”45 And indeed, the Electra Album now lies in the Sophia Smith Collection, until recently housed in the building that used to be the gymnasium where the play was performed. As a memory book—a genre to which nineteenth-century women were devoted—the Electra Album transcribed a memorable performance, but in many ways the performance also prescribed the album, as the Smith Electra was destined for the archives from its very conception. The archiving of Electra was another way for the students at Smith to represent their self-consciously archaic presentation, illustrating how dead Greek letters might be made to speak from the past to the present and the future. As a transcription that is not quite a translation, the album exemplifies Ladies’ Greek: it transposes the ancient language into modern metrical, musical, and choreographic notation for an embodied performance of female classical literacy on stage, while also transcribing what was performed into notations on the page that prove, like ancient Greek, difficult to decipher. Thus the class of 1889 at Smith College enacted different ways of knowing Greek, on the stage and on the page, as a memorable event for an intimate circle of women within the college community and as a public spectacle for all to remember. Although the Girton Electra and the Smith Electra were performed in small, semiprivate academic settings, these seemingly idiosyncratic college productions in ancient Greek paved the way for women to perform Greek tragedy in English in theatrical productions across England and America. Sophocles’ Electra proved especially popular, as the American Academy of Dramatic Arts staged a production at the New York Lyceum in 1889, and others followed soon thereafter, including professional performances by Margaret Anglin in the early twentieth century. Helene Foley has traced the career of Anglin as America’s foremost tragic actress, who brought Greek tragedy to broad audiences: Anglin played the role of Electra in 1913 in the Hearst Greek Theatre at Berkeley to crowds of thousands, and again to sell-out crowds at Carnegie Hall in 1918 and at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1927.46 Yet such large-scale commercial 150

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productions would not have been possible without the collegiate culture of Ladies’ Greek, where passionate amateurs had translated Electra into Delsartean principles that persisted in Anglin’s acting style. Thus reviewers noted that “her movements and flowing gestures always solidified into Greek poses and gestures,” and Theater Magazine featured Anglin in an iconic portrait, posing “as Electra, in the great scene apostrophizing the funeral urn containing the supposed ashes of her brother, Orestes.”47 The solidification of this Greek pose can be recognized within the longer history of women performing Sophocles’ Electra, including the outstanding performance by Janet Case at Girton College and the collective presentation (and re-presentations) of the scene at Smith College. The education of Electra filled the empty urn with new meanings, as a turning point in the reception of Greek tragedy that transformed a receptacle for mourning in Greek into performances of women’s desire for Greek: behold and see.

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Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek (with the Accents) New Measures for New Women With the formation of women’s colleges and the entry of more women into higher education toward the end of the century, the Woman of Greek Letters was increasingly associated with the idea of the “New Woman,” reforming social and sexual norms toward the end of the nineteenth century. In her essay, “The Women Poets of the Seventies” (1929), Vita Sackville-West looked back on the 1870s as a time of transition that “perhaps might prove the genesis of the literary woman’s emancipation.”1 Although in her estimation the women writers of this decade produced “nothing of any remarkable value,” nevertheless she admired their intellectual ambition: “a general sense of women scribbling, scribbling” was the “most encouraging sign of all” (131) that a new generation of poets was about to emerge. They followed the lead of mid-Victorian poetesses like “Mrs. Browning” because “she had been taught Greek; her father had been a man of culture; and she had married a poet” (112). But because they depended less on fathers and husbands in learning ancient Greek at college, the next generation demonstrated an independence of mind that was anxiously parodied by Punch magazine, as quoted by Sackville-West (114): The woman of the future! she’ll be deeply read, that’s certain, With all the education gained at Newnham or at Girton; Or if she turns to classic tomes, a literary roamer, She’ll give you bits of Horace or sonorous lines from Homer. Oh pedants of these later days, who go on undiscerning To overload a woman’s brains and cram our girls with learning. You’ll make a woman half a man, the souls of parents vexing, To find that all the gentle sex this process is unsexing.

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While Sackville-West (herself a woman of the future) was amused by this caricature of the New Woman, the classical education of “the gentle sex” was more “vexing” for most contemporary readers of Punch. Not only might the Woman of Greek Letters prove that “a woman’s brains” could think like a man, but there was also the implication that this intellectual “unsexing” could lead to sexual transgression. The “literary roamer,” reading promiscuously through “classic tomes,” would be free to discover new forms of female sexuality and feminine desire, and so “make a woman half a man.” Much as Greek eros increasingly served to define homoerotic discourses between men toward the end of the nineteenth century, a passionate reading of Greek defined various kinds of female communities as well, creating a cultural space for female homorelationality and defining a place for New Women in the New Hellenism.2 Their desire for Greek created a new language of desire that circulated among women within and beyond Victorian Oxford and Victorian Cambridge, in other women’s colleges and around the margins of academia, in female literary circles and clubs, especially in London. Among the “scribbling, scribbling” women of the 1870s was A. Mary F. Robinson, an aspiring poetess who lived in Bloomsbury, within walking distance of the British Museum where she was frequently seen in the Reading Room. She is featured in the midst of a bookish crowd in a Punch cartoon, entitled “Valuable Collection in the Reading-Room, British Museum” (figure 4.1).3 Surrounded by contemporary poets (including Swinburne and Browning, in the lower left corner) and other Victorian men of letters, Robinson appears in the center as the only woman of letters, holding in her hand her first collection of poems, A Handful of Honeysuckle (1878). This was also the year that Robinson began attending lectures as one of the first official female students at University College London. At UCL she proved herself a serious student of Greek and crammed her brain with classical learning; even if Robinson did not boast of an “education gained at Newnham or at Girton,” she was a woman of the future as predicted by Punch, and “deeply read, that’s certain.” During her Greek studies in London, Robinson engaged in an elaborate literary correspondence with John Addington Symonds, the poet and classical scholar who had recently published Studies of the Greek Poets (First Series 1873; Second Series 1877).4 In the first half of this chapter, I draw in some detail on her letters to Symonds (still unpublished), in order to analyze his “queer” tutelage of the young Miss Robinson, and to demonstrate how his chapter on Euripidean tragedy influenced her decision to translate the Hippolytus of Euripides. She published this translation at the start of her second volume of poetry

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4.1 A. Mary F. Robinson in “Valuable Collection in the Reading-Room, British Museum.” Cartoon in Punch (March 28, 1885).

in 1881: The Crowned Hippolytus, Translated from Euripides with New Poems by A. Mary F. Robinson, dedicated “To My Friend, J. A. Symonds.” As a New Woman, whose friendships included various male and female aesthetes (including an intimate friendship with Vernon Lee), Robinson was especially interested in Hippolytus as a figure for homoerotic aestheticism, and in Phaedra as a figure for transgressive feminine desire. Her translation of these characters amplified the highly aestheticized and homoeroticized reading of Euripides’ Hippolytus proposed by Symonds. His defense of Euripidean “decadence” further inspired Robinson to experiment with the cadences of English poetry, especially in translating the choral odes. Robinson’s translation of Hippolytus is a tour de force, as we shall see: a virtuosic metrical performance, inventing new measures for a generation of women who were interested in exploring poetic forms with a wider range of erotic undertones and overtones. In Robinson, we can trace the emergence of Ladies’ Greek “with” the accents, accentuating new rhythms of desire. The second half of my chapter turns to Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), whose lifelong interest in Euripides can be understood not only in relation to male writers associated with fin-de-siècle decadence and twentieth-century imagism, as 154

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previous critics have variously proposed, but also in relation to female aestheticism. H.D. was another “woman of the future” and a “literary roamer,” who roamed even more freely through classic tomes, and especially the texts of Euripides. Like Robinson, H.D. was drawn to Hippolytus as a play that revolves around Greek eros, and she defined her early career as a poet by transforming Euripidean tragedy in her own form of versification. In 1919, H.D. published Choruses from the Hippolytus of Euripides, transposing Greek into English “free verse.” She went on to transform the principal characters of the tragedy in a series of poems published in Hymen (1921), exploring both the poetry of eros and the eros of poetry through worship of Artemis, especially by the bisexual figure of Hippolytus. His pursuit of the swift-footed Artemis is further elaborated in Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), a longer verse drama that reflects back on how H.D. defined herself, both in poetry and in prose, by pursuing the “feet feet feet feet” of Euripidean tragedy. In these versions of Hippolytus, H.D. performed an identification with Greek letters that repeats the generic conventions of Ladies’ Greek, while also translating Greek tragedy into and out of her own psychobiography. Because of the proliferation of autobiographical fictions written by H.D. herself, and the publication of literary biographies written by critics (part of the feminist recovery of H.D. that began in the 1980s), H.D. is a more familiar figure than Robinson, whose biography remains yet to be written. But in turning to Euripidean tragedy for “lyric” inspiration, the modernist poetics of H.D. are not so far from Robinson’s late Victorian verse. Through their translations of Hippolytus, I reconstruct the early poetic careers of Robinson and H.D. as a dramatic interplay between Greek and English that transformed each of them into a Woman of Letters. While I do not propose that we read Robinson as a direct source or influence for H.D., I juxtapose the two poets in order to demonstrate the central role played by women in the reception of Euripides as a “modern” poet, and to accentuate how their experiments with new forms of versification transformed women’s poetry from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

“A Brisk Interchange of Letters” Early in her long literary career, Agnes Mary Frances Robinson (1857–1944) was considered one of the poetesses most likely to inherit the laurels of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In “Some London Poets” (1882), the American critic and poet E. C. Stedman described his visits to her father’s house on Gower Street, known for “literary and musical receptions,” a library “curiously rich with rare and antique volumes,” and a lovely daughter basking “in the friendly Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek 155

encouragement of the London literary world, by many of whose members, and most certainly by myself, she is thought to be possessed of that priceless faculty—a true gift of song” (886).5 Although it seemed to Stedman that “no female poet of modern times has fairly equaled Mrs. Browning” (884), he found Miss Robinson to be “like Mrs. Browning, an enthusiastic student of Greek,” noting that “her second book, recently out, contains a translation of ‘The Crowned Hippolytus,’ followed by her new miscellaneous poems” (887). The following year, Eric Robertson also announced in English Poetesses that “Miss Robinson has been winning interest personally in London literary circles” as “the daughter of a man of letters” (377). “Learned in the classic tongue” (376), she was praised for her knowledge of Greek in particular. According to Robertson, her education was “completed with literary and classical studies at University College London,” and “when it was announced that Miss Robinson was about to publish The Crowned Hippolytus, a metrical translation from Euripides, some began to ask whether a second Mrs. Browning was coming” (377). Robert Browning himself took an interest in the young Miss Robinson. He too visited her father’s literary salon in London on various occasions; years later, when she was hosting her own literary salon in Paris, first as Mme. Darmesteter and then as Mme. Duclaux, Robinson recalled: “When I knew Browning he was more than sixty years old, and I was eighteen. . . . If he had affection for me it was, I think, because that fragile young girl who wrote verses and read Greek poems reminded him—ever so remotely—of the shadow of his dear Elizabeth, long dead.”6 Like E.B.B., who had started her poetic career by translating Greek tragedy, Robinson was reading Greek tragedy when she met Robert Browning, and also proclaimed Aeschylus to be her favorite. Remembering that Browning had recently translated the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Robinson plotted an amateur production of the play in Greek, casting herself in the role of Cassandra and imagining Browning as her Agamemnon: “I can’t think of an Agamemnon. My Greek Master is (to put it mildly) somewhat ponderous for the part. I might ask Mr. Browning, he is quite young in his ways & might cover his venerable hairs with a wig!”7 Although Robinson’s dramatic plot was never enacted, she did enter into an active literary dialogue with Browning. He gave her a copy of his poetry personally inscribed with his best regards, and once the great poet even “came into my study and looked at my books,” reading out loud passages of poetry. “It was something always to remember,” she wrote (248f.44), as a memorable episode that identified the young Elizabeth Barrett with the young Mary Robinson: perhaps Browning had seen a bit of E.B.B. in her. Robinson’s identification with E.B.B. was more than personal, however. In her Preface to Casa Guidi Windows, Robinson recorded a tribute engraved on the 156

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Italian home of the famous Poetess, “who reconciled in her woman’s heart the scholar’s knowledge and the poet’s mind” (vi). E.B.B.’s claim to female authorship, mediated by translating Greek, made her an exemplary figure for women poets of the fin de siècle. Like other women of her generation, Robinson was eager to convert “Lady’s Greek, without the accents” into a thorough knowledge of ancient Greek. She too learned classical languages at an early age, and she too played out an intense desire for Greek in her poetry. In her ballad, “Two Sisters” (published in The Crowned Hippolytus) she recalls tomboy games she played with her sister Mabel, who acted like “an Amazon of eight,” while Mary took the part of Greek tragic heroines with a “taste for violent tragedy” that “would make me plot / Revenge.”8 Quoting from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Robinson compares herself to the fearless Clytemnestra: “I always showed at hint of fear / γυναικòς ἀνδρóβουλον κῆρ” (CH 183). The Greek phrase gunaikos androboulon ker (literally, “a woman’s heart with the will of a man”) is untranslated and untransliterated in the poem, yet cleverly manipulated by Robinson to fit the rhyme and rhythm of her English verse. “So prevails audacious / The man’s-way-planning hoping heart of woman” had been Robert Browning’s translation of the phrase a few years earlier in his Agamemnon (3). The unusual Aeschylean epithet describes the androgynous character of Clytemnestra, who appropriates masculine authority in the house of Agamemnon and plots revenge against her husband. Within the context of Robinson’s poem, the reference to this character from Greek drama (and more literally, the appearance of these Greek letters) serves to dramatize the inscription of young Mary’s literary character, audaciously incorporating “the man’s way” of reading ancient Greek into “the hoping heart of woman.” Clytemnestra’s audacity prevails, inscribed in Greek on Mary’s heart. So Robinson took to heart the example of E.B.B., using Greek to incorporate the scholar’s knowledge and the poet’s mind into her own poetry. But while the young Elizabeth Barrett learned Greek from private tutors and personal mentors, Robinson found additional support for her scholarly ambitions at college, making the transition from informal schooling of girls at home to more formal higher education. The coeducation of University College London, close to her house on Gower Street, enabled Robinson to pursue Greek studies alongside male students.9 Often she was the only female student in the class, as her sister Mabel recounts: “One day, it was announced that the advanced course in Greek for young ladies would be incorporated into the gentleman’s course; and there was Mary, so diminutive, the sole representative of the entire feminine sex.”10 Robinson found encouragement from teachers like Alfred Goodwin, professor of Latin and Greek, much admired for the enthusiasm, sympathy, and charm of his teaching. He was especially supportive of women students, as one of them Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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later recalled in a poetic tribute, with a pun on his name: “He was a scholar, and a ripe and a good one.”11 Part of his appeal was that “he gave lectures on Greek and Latin authors, with “fine literary taste” and “much attention . . . to textual questions,” along with occasional forays into more polemical topics such as “the relation of ancient to modern Socialism, the position of women in Greek society, etc.” More than a philologist, he inspired not only a love of Greek but a kind of pedagogical eros that made him much beloved by pupils: “his influence over his pupils was due to his force of character no less than to his learning, and was exercised as much in the friendly intercourse which he held with some of them as within the walls of University College.”12 By the force of his character Professor Goodwin also influenced the formation of Robinson’s literary character. He firmly “believed that a literary education was the best form of education and that a competent knowledge of Greek and Latin—especially Greek—was a necessary part of a literary education” (22). Robinson attended his lectures and was singled out for special attention, as she reported in a letter from November 1879: “The other day there was an exam in Plato’s Republic &, to my surprise, I and two young men came out bracketed first. Since then Professor Goodwin has been most good to me, tells me what books to read, argues my ‘modernisms’ of thought away as much as he can” (248 f.90). He insisted on a philological approach that would make Robinson less “modern” and more scholarly in her reading of Greek texts: “Mr. Goodwin says I am a great deal too modern & only approach Plato on the sensuous & poetic side, & ought to read unlimited Greek books,” Robinson wrote (248 f.92). Under his tutelage, she applied herself to a rigorous regime of reading Greek—“I ought to be preparing my Plato for Mr. Goodwin’s Class at 12” was her daily refrain (248 f.49). Enforced by Goodwin, this daily discipline developed her desire for Greek according to, and increasingly beyond, his idea of a desirable classical education. Robinson was an active student at University College for several years, excelling in exams, publishing in the University Magazine, and participating in the Women’s Debating Society. She had some misgivings about her future in academia, however: The Women’s Debating Society at University College have selected me one of the Committee. I feel dreadfully out of place, a frivolous poet, among all the learned ladies in checked Ulsters. I suppose they elected me for the sake of the Greek. So when they asked me to choose a subject of Debate I chose the difference between Classic & Modern Ideals in Literature and Arts. I am to open the Debate with a Speech. (248 f.40). 158

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Debating both sides of “Classic & Modern Ideals,” Robinson succeeded academically but ultimately did not pursue a university degree: the “modernisms of thought” that Professor Goodwin had identified in Robinson made her more of a modern poet than a classical scholar. For developing the more poetical side of her literary character, Robinson turned to “My Friend, J. A. Symonds,” to whom she dedicated her translation of Hippolytus: a more modern man of letters who shared her love of ancient Greek letters. In 1878 John Addington Symonds initiated “a brisk interchange of letters with Miss Robinson,” as he confessed to his friend Edmund Gosse: “I felt so much interest in her poems that I wrote to her about them; & her answer to that letter drew me into wordy correspondence” (Symonds, Letters II: 583). While most of the letters from Symonds to Robinson are lost, many of Robinson’s early letters to him survive, albeit unpublished. These letters are a lively record of her student years, which she described to Symonds as “a whirl of Concerts, Operas, Theatres, Dances, Lectures, Classes, Women’s Rights Meetings, & Debates” (248 f.115). She also described her inner life, revealing what she called her “unlettered, small-knowing soul” (248 f.60) to Symonds, hoping that he would enlarge her knowledge and teach how to decipher her own thoughts like a Greek palimpsest. “I’m too shy to make confident friends πρòς ἄκρον μυελòν ψυχῆς [pros akron muelon psuches, “at the inner corner of the soul”] with people I can see,” she wrote (248 f.37), leaving something inscribed in ancient Greek at the inner corner of her own soul, for Symonds to translate.13 Through this desire to be translated and understood by Symonds, Robinson turned him into an idealized mentor for her poetic development. “Your picture stands above my writing-table looking kindly-anxious for all my perplexities,” she wrote, drawing strength from his correspondence that “lies in a drawer just underneath and serves, as I may need it, for oracle or consolation” (248 f.13). Addressing her letters to “My dear Mr. Symonds,” she appealed to him for expertise in Greek and English poetry. In December 1878, for example, she wrote for help with classical meters: Can you tell me where I can get help about Metre by Quantity. I can find nothing better than Smith’s Classical Dictionary, which gave me my Hendecasyllabics wrong. I used to think it was being a girl made me ignorant but now I learn Greek with the other students at University College where I do not get on any better. We never read anything but Hexameter or Trimeter Iambic because we either leave the Choruses out or read them so slowly they are no use. Of course I read them to myself at home but probably all wrong. (248 f.14) Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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The lyric meters of Greek choruses were of special interest to Robinson. She was eager to learn the fine points of Classical prosody from Symonds, as she was experimenting with various metrical forms in her own poetry. Copying out some of her poems in a fair hand, she sent them to Symonds for critique, and he responded in turn by sending his poems to her as well. As their literary relationship developed, the letters from Robinson to Symonds (a man twice her age) became increasingly intimate. After Robert Browning’s memorable visit to her study, Robinson felt free to confide in Symonds: “how nice it would be if you could come & sit in my little study & read Greek choruses to me” (248 f.50). But it was several years before Robinson met Symonds in person. Although they exchanged photographs now and then, their literary friendship depended on the exchange of letters, in English and in Greek. “Shall I meet with my friend anywhere?” Robinson once asked him, “If I did, it would seem too strange— because (φοτογραφς notwithstanding) I cannot imagine you a real solid human person” (248 f.32). The playful spelling out of photographs in Greek graphically emphasizes how each created an image of the other through (Greek) letters, in an ongoing literary dialogue. Symonds asked Robinson for advice on poems and essays he was preparing for publication, and on occasion she also did literary research for him in London. At the British Library, she was frequently seen as visitor to the Reading Room, as she wrote to Symonds: “I am well-acquainted with the ways of the φροντιστήριον” [phrontisterion,“a place for thinking”], humorously recalling what Aristophanes called the school of Socrates (248 f. 15). Robinson lived her life intensely in books, and in the books of Symonds she found idealized literary passions like her own. “You always quote things I have long liked. That Greek proverb ἔρως ἀδυνατὼν κ.τ.λ. [eros adunaton k. t. l., “unconquerable eros etc.”] is an old favourite of mine—but after all, I think I first found it in one of your books” (248 f.26). The proverb to which Robinson alludes—about the overpowering force of eros—hints how desire for Greek was erotically charged for both poets, albeit in different ways. Robinson understood that for Symonds the love of Greek might signify another kind of desire, “an indefinable πóθος [pothos, “desire”] that is almost despair, that, right or wrong, I have come to consider a characteristic of your poetry” (248 f.13), as she wrote to him. In the Greek-inspired poems that Symonds sent for her to read, Robinson recognized the homoerotic overtones of Platonic pothos, the yearning or desire for ideal beauty that Symonds later described more openly in his memoir, in response to Greek sculpture: “The Greek in me awoke to that simple, and yet so splendid, vision of young manhood . . . all my dim forebodings of the charm of males were here idealized. The overpowering magic of masculine adolescence drew my tears forth.”14 As 160

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various critics have argued, the “Hellenic fantasies” of Symonds were his attempt to articulate a discourse of male homosexuality that was emerging in late nineteenth-century England: in “A Problem in Greek Ethics” (rewritten while he was working on Studies of the Greek Poets), we see how Symonds idealized Greek spirit, and how this idealization influenced his homoerotic interpretation of classical Greek literature and art.15 Robinson understood the multiple associations of Platonic love, as she wrote in a letter to Symonds about her first encounter with Plato in Greek: Just now I read Plato’s Republic, for the first time in Greek. I am again the only woman but we have a new professor who is very kind and treats me just like a boy so I do not feel so shy. How I should [love?] to read it with you! It seems so alive after all these years. . . . I remember when I was at school, I used to read it all the playhours & knew many passages by heart. . . . Talk to me about Plato, whom I know you love, like you did about Whitman. (248 f.76) Imagining herself for a moment “just like a boy” in her Greek studies, Robinson seemed to be asking for an initiation into the homoeroetic Hellenism of Symonds. She knowingly associated his love of Plato with his love of Walt Whitman, and was eager to learn more about the imaginative possibilities of these homoerotic projections and sympathetic identifications. Adopting a familiar metaphor from Plato, she described her “Platonic” friendship with Symonds as a way for her soul to grow wings: “You in helping me are raising me nearer your own level—you are making a friend that will comprehend you at last. Then I will never fail you. My soul is new-born & feeble, it is only half-fledged & if you go there will be no one to teach it to fly” (248 f.16). Early in her correspondence with Symonds, Robinson often expressed a need for a sympathetic mentor who would teach her soul to fly beyond its bounds. Despite the success of Robinson’s first volume of poems, A Handful of Honeysuckle (1878), she doubted her poetic abilities. Feeling awkward about “the unmerited sympathy & attention that I have received from so many poets,” she worried: “Surely people must soon tire of the tinkling of a lyre with so few strings. I cannot write what I do not feel and I feel so little. I would put up with all the misfortunes of Cassandra and Electra if I could change my cold nature for theirs” (248 f.10). But if Robinson seemed to fall short of those Greek heroines whose tragic passions created great poetry, she also believed that Greek tragedy could serve as an ideal form for developing intensity of feeling. Like Symonds, she read Greek literature to discover her own desires, transforming Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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her “cold nature”—through sympathetic identification and the vicarious experience of pathos—into a soul filled with Greek pothos. As she wrote to him, “I would rather you thought of me as an earnest, thoughtful little soul . . . longing, longing to do right & so grateful to you for showing her how” (248 f.20). Much as Symonds shared his love of Greek with Robinson, her letters to him were written with the understanding that Greek eros could also define relations between women. Despite confessing doubts and professing modesty, Robinson admitted to a “fierce rebelliousness” when it came to the cause of women, and she used Greek to proclaim her feminism. “To be quite naturally a failure because one is a woman—Horrible thought. οὐ τλητὸν οὐδέ ῥήτον [ou tleton oude rheton, “intolerable and unspeakable”].  .  .  . No, I will never believe it,” she wrote to Symonds, invoking “shades of Sappho, Erinna, Myrtilla” as well as George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hippolyta, Joan of Arc, and various other female icons to “shelter me with the Aegis of your ways!” (248 f.104). No doubt Symonds recognized the implications of this litany of women who defied gender conventions, beginning with the notorious Sappho: in Studies of the Greek Poets, Symonds had written quite openly about the lesbian passions of Sappho’s circle on the island of Lesbos, and his translations of Sappho made it clear that her love poems were addressed to women.16 The inclusion of Hippolyta, the only mythical figure in Robinson’s list of historical women, had similar implications: as queen of the Amazons, she was the prototype of a woman whose withdrawal from men signified not a “cold nature” (as Robinson sometimes feared about herself) but a different form of sympathetic feeling, directed towards women. The Platonic friendship between Symonds and Robinson can be understood as a period of “queer” tutelage, with his passionate response to Greek literature serving as a model for Robinson to discover the passion of her own literary projections and erotic identifications. Their correspondence coincided with the time when Robinson was developing an intimate friendship with Vernon Lee (the pen name of Violet Paget). After meeting Lee in 1879, Robinson traveled to see her in Italy in 1880, as she recalled her first visit to Casa Paget: “People came, attracted by the brilliance of the daughter of the house, Vernon Lee.”17 Robinson was also attracted to this brilliant woman, with whom she discovered increasing intimacy of intellectual and emotional exchange: “We were always writing in corners, Violet and I,” exchanging “impressions, forecasts, reminiscences, quotations” as well as “subjects for ballads, problems for essays, aesthetical debates and moral discussions” (936). Although Symonds did not approve of this relationship—in fact, he seems to have considered Vernon Lee a rival for Robinson’s affections18—it was clear to him that Robinson had formed a 162

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powerful bond with another woman of letters who was also well-versed in classical languages and modern literatures. And so his intimate correspondence with “My dear Miss Robinson” had to expand to include another person, and finally he assented to addressing his letters to both women together: “You see I am writing to you both now: κοῖνὰ τα τῶν φίλων [koina ta ton philon, “friends hold things in common”] (Letters II, 931). He made a point of not translating the Greek phrase precisely because they all understood how much, and how intimately, knowing Greek allowed friends to hold things in common.

Euripidean (De)Cadence In addition to learning much from her correspondence with Symonds, Robinson was an avid reader of his Studies of the Greek Poets, a book that had more than scholarly appeal for many readers. “Of course I have read Studies in the Greek Poets [sic], many a time & oft,” she wrote to him, “—It is one of my favorite books” (248 f.26). Especially instructive, in the chapter on “Greek Tragedy and Euripides,” were his comments on Hippolytus. Although readers of this Euripidean tragedy have traditionally focused on the pathos of Phaedra (whose incestuous love for her stepson, Hippolytus, leads to her suicide), Symonds was especially interested in the “chaste” love of Hippolytus (who withholds himself from intercourse with all women and worships only Artemis). In a rhapsodic description of the Greek hero, Symonds wrote: I do not want to dwell upon the pining sickness of Phaedra, which Euripides has wrought with exquisitely painful details, but rather to call attention to Hippolytus. Side by side with the fever of Phaedra is the pure fresh health of the hunter-hero. The scent of forest-glades, where he pursues the deer with Artemis, surrounds him; the sea-breeze from the sands, where he trains his horses, moves his curls. His piety is as untainted as his purity; it is the maiden-service of a maiden-saint. (Studies of the Greek Poets, 233–34) Phaedra was less interesting to Symonds than the pious Hippolytus, whose chaste beauty lends itself to various identifications across gender: as the son of Hippolyta, the Amazon queen, he embodies a feminized masculinity born from a masculinized femininity. He is a male Amazon, recoiling from the heterosexual eros of Aphrodite and dedicating himself in “the maiden-service of a maiden-saint” to the virginal Artemis. According to Symonds, his “pure fresh health” is exercised in nature where he keeps company with the goddess, Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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entering her sacred precincts without violating her; thus his “piety is as untainted as his purity.” Hippolytus increasingly looks and sounds like an ideal male aesthete, as Symonds imagines “the pure fresh health of the hunter-hero” with his windblown curls. Symonds admires how “Hippolytus first comes upon the stage with a garland of wild flowers for Artemis” (234), and his first speech is quoted in translation: Lady, for thee this garland I have woven Of wilding flowers plucked from an unshorn meadow, Where neither shepherd dares to feed his flock, Nor ever scythe has swept, but through the mead Unshorn in spring the bee pursues her labours, And maiden modesty with running rills Waters the garden. Sweet queen, take my crown To deck thy golden hair: my hand is holy. To me alone of men belongs this honour, To be with thee and answer when thou speakest; Yes, for I hear thy voice but do not see thee. So may I end my life as I began. (234) Translated by Symonds, the poetry of this lyric prayer paints a scene in nature that seems increasingly supernatural: an “unshorn meadow” untouched by man, a pastoral place without shepherds or sheep, a utopian space outside of time. Here, watering the garden with “running rills” that never seem to run out, “maiden modesty” presides: an allegorical personification of the Greek word aidos, meaning both “modesty” and “shame.” This virginal meadow is a projection and spatialization of desire for Hippolytus, an adolescent boy (parthenos) who wants to remain forever a virgin. As Froma Zeitlin points out, “Hippolytus sacralizes virginity, and the manner of his exclusive worship of the goddess suggests the cultural values often embedded in the idea of maidenhood,” but his identification with the maiden modesty of Artemis also runs the risk of “transcending the laws of nature and even of gender.”19 Hippolytus projects himself imaginatively into Artemisian spaces, where heterosexuality is suspended and gender becomes ambiguous. Hippolytus is ultimately punished by Aphrodite for this transgression, but in the “queer” reading of the play proposed by Symonds, it is not a transgression of human nature for a young man to identify with Artemis; rather, it is naturalized as a projection of a different kind of desire. The imaginary place 164

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that Hippolytus seeks to enter is the space of homoerotic aestheticism, or so Symonds seems to imply in the commentary on his own translation: Even in this bald translation some of the fresh morning feeling, as of cool fields and living waters, and pure companionship and a heart at peace, transpires. Throughout the play, this impression is maintained, in spite of the usual Euripidean blemishes of smart logic-chopping and pragmatical sententiousness. Hippolytus moves through it with the athletic charm that belongs to such statues as that of Meleager and his dog in the Vatican. (234) According to Symonds the “pure companionship” of Hippolytus and Artemis removes the young hero from the ravages of heterosexual desire; he “moves through” the play with an “athletic charm,” yet remains essentially unmoved with “a heart at peace.” Like the classical statue of Meleager, he incarnates the boyish ideal that Symonds admired in Greek statuary, a familiar figure for homoerotic identification. Indeed, Hippolytus seems to become like the statue of Artemis that he worships, as Symonds asks his readers to imagine that “the scent of the forest coolness has been blown upon him” and “his death will now be calm” (235). Symonds translates his final dialogue with the goddess, where she promises Hippolytus that he too will be worshipped: Unwedded maids before their bridals Shall rear their locks for thee, and thou for ever Shalt reap the harvest of unnumbered tears. Yea, and for aye, with lyre and song the virgins Shall keep thy memory. (235) Artemis predicts that young girls will pray to the image of Hippolytus as they pray to her, when they prepare to leave the uncut meadow of their virginity: they will cut their long locks in honor of Hippolytus, and he will harvest their tears while they lament his memory “with lyre and song.” In songs performed by “unwedded maids before their bridals,” the tragedy of Hippolytus will be remembered: as his name suggests, a story of a boy dragged to death by his horses, destroyed by unbridled heterosexual eros. The two passages from Hippolytus that Symonds chose to translate and interpret in his Studies of the Greek Poets were influential for Robinson’s translation of the play, as her own celebration of “maiden-service to a maiden-saint.” Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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By translating the play from Greek into English verse, she aligned herself with those young maidens keeping the memory of Hippolytus “with lyre and song.” The title of her translation, The Crowned Hippolytus, emphasizes that the hero who brings a garland to crown Artemis is himself crowned in flowers, a figure for the flowers of speech he bestows upon the goddess. The prayer so lyrically translated by Symonds is even more lyrical in Robinson’s translation, turning this wreath of language into a veritable anthology of poetic tropes: I bring for thee a plaited wreath of flowers From meadow lands untrodden and unmown. There never shepherd dares to feed his flocks, Nor iron comes therein; only the bee Through that unsullied meadow in the spring Flies on and leaves it pure, and Reverence Freshens with rivers’ dew the tended flowers. And only they whose virtue is untaught, They that inherit purity, may pluck Their bloom and gather it—no baser man. Yet, O dear mistress, from this pious hand Take thou a garland for thy golden hair. For I, of all men, only am thy friend To share thy converse and companionship. Hearing thy voice, whose eyes I never see— And thus may I live until I reach the goal! (CH 6) In its musical manipulation of alliteration and assonance, Robinson’s translation is a more flowing and flowery description of the meadow, where “Reverence / Freshens with rivers’ dew the tended flowers.” Even more than Symonds, Robinson emphasizes the “purity” of the meadow: while Symonds simply repeats the adjective “unshorn,” in Robinson’s translation the “unsullied meadow” is “untrodden and unmown,” defined by a series of negations (“never shepherd dares . . . nor iron comes . . . no baser man”) that make it a truly utopian space in the etymological sense of the word (ou topos in Greek: no place). Thus Robinson introduces Hippolytus as a highly lyricized figure, and projects him into an aestheticized, feminized space where “no baser man” can intrude. Furthermore, the idealized relation between Hippolytus and Artemis—what Symonds called their “pure companionship”—is directly assimilated into the language of Robinson’s translation, when Hippolytus prays to Artemis to be 166

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“thy friend” and “share thy converse and companionship.” This phrase is also quoted (in Greek) by Robinson in one of her early letters to Symonds: It is very good of you to write to me and to take an interest in my life, which is a nice little life enough but very narrow—it is such a delight for me to know you, σοὶ καὶ ξύνειμι καὶ λόγοις σ’αμείβομαι κλύων μὲν αὐδήν, ὄμμα δ’οὐχ ὁρῶν τὸ σόν. Hippolytus again, oh dear! I am reading it now every morning at University College & it runs in my head all day (248 f.19). Here the Euripidean text translated by Symonds in Studies of the Greek Poets (“to be with thee and answer when thou speakest; / Yea, for I hear thy voice but do not see thee,” 234) is untranslated in Robinson’s letter to him, and later retranslated by Robinson in The Crowned Hippolytus (“to share thy converse and companionship / Hearing thy voice, whose eyes I never see,” 6). In this interplay of translations Robinson sought a form of intimate “converse and companionship” with Symonds, as if each could “hear thy voice” without actually seeing the other in person. The ideal of a friendship, simultaneously intimate and remote, was played out not only in Robinson’s correspondence with Symonds but in the act of translating Hippolytus as well. Through the figure of Hippolytus, Robinson therefore came to articulate a language of “pure companionship” that she shared first with Symonds, and then with Vernon Lee. Indeed, Hippolytus would seem to be one of those adolescent boys that female aesthetes could appropriate from male aestheticism and turn into a trope for desire between women: the male Amazon as Lesbian boy.20 In addition to dedicating her translation to Symonds as her friend and mentor, Robinson included a ballad in The Crowned Hippolytus  .  .  . And New Poems that was dedicated to her new female companion. The prologue (addressed “To Vernon Lee”) announces that this ballad is based on a story narrated by Lee to Robinson, who now repeats the story in verse: “for little I dreamed with what continuing power / Your words upon my inner ear should swell” (CH 82). The ballad is another story of pure companionship, in which a beautiful boy is doomed never to marry the girl he loves, but nevertheless “loved to dream himself Hippolytus / And her white Artemis, the heavenly maid” (CH 87). Lifting Hippolytus out of her Greek translation and into her own English poem, Robinson makes the figure available for new homoerotic identifications: herself as Hippolytus and Lee as the untouchable Artemis, or perhaps vice versa. The double dedication to Symonds and Vernon Lee in The Crowned Hippolytus suggests how these two friendships encouraged Robinson, through different modes of “converse and companionship,” to give form to her scholarly, poetic, Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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and personal desires at a formative moment in her literary career, simultaneously making Greek translation part of her poetry and poetry part of her Greek translation. Alongside Robinson’s cross-identification with Hippolytus as male (or female) aesthete, there was also the possibility, and the problem, of identifying with Phaedra.21 Phaedra’s sexuality, dismissed by Symonds as her “pining sickness,” is the focus of several misogynistic passages that Robinson first encountered in her Greek studies at University College London: I am the only girl-student in the Senior Class and out of politeness to us the Professor makes the unfortunate youths translate Euripides’ diatribe against women all wrong. For instance that passage in the Epode of the first chorus, about the evil unhappy helplessness of the wayward disposition of women, he made them translate ‘the complex nature of females is prone to daydreams.’ At which compliment not all the dignity of my newly-acquired womanhood could save me from laughing aloud. In the evenings I try translating it into English verse, but what I have done sounds so odd & funny that I think I shall have to give it up. (248 f.19) While Robinson responded with humor to the mistranslation of womanly character (Phaedra’s as well as her own), in doing her own translation of the play, she found it difficult to strike a balance between the lyrical and more polemical passages. Her first resolution to “try translating it into English verse” came in January of 1879, but often she was close to giving up, as she wrote to Symonds in February: “I don’t think I can go on translating Euripides. It is too exasperating to feel a beauty summoning one that one is quite unable to express” (248 f.26). By March, she promised to “send some Hippolytus” to him but warned that “only fragments, unconnected & incomplete, are in existence,” and then went on to suggest that he take over the project: “I wish you would translate Hippolytus” (248 f.40). Symonds insisted, however, that she finish the project she had begun, and later that spring she resolved to try again: “Since you like my Hippolytus, I will finish it in the Holiday” (248 f.60). During July 1879, when Robinson was visiting a country house in Warwick, she wrote a series of letters to Symonds about what she did during her summer vacation: she was busy translating Hippolytus. Her description of the English countryside (“the hay is still standing and has grown very long, it is full of flowers and the seeds in the grass give a faint rosy bloom to the meadow”) echoed the famous meadow passage from the Hippolytus of Euripides, and she reported that her sister Mabel was out of doors painting a hayfield that looked 168

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like “the virginal meadow in Hippolytus (248 f.63). Recalling the lyric prayer of Hippolytus to Artemis, she found in nature a scene for imaginary identification, projecting her desires simultaneously into and out of the Greek text. She entertained “pastoral visions of translating that play out of doors,” as if she might inhabit the highly poetic descriptions of nature in the play, although she was quick to admit that her vision of the play was more textual than natural: “I spend more time than I ought in the library” (248 f.63). In fact the translation did not come naturally at all, as Robinson struggled daily with the Greek text. In particular the character of Phaedra seemed to be growing out of proportion, deflowering the beauty of the play: I am getting into great despair about Hippolytus. Every morning I leave off on the verge of tears. All the faults of the original, the out-of-place philosophy, the sudden change in Phaedra’s character seem to shoot up the Jack’s beanstalk, & the beauty, the tear-wringing pathos, & wisdom vanish, or rather they are quite left out in my translation like the fragrance in the painted copy of a rose. Then, as to style, it sounds so untidy & wild—not in the least κομψευριπικῶς [kompseuripikos, “in the pretty Euripidean style”]. (248 f.66) Here the “tear-wringing pathos” of Euripidean tragedy is transferred to Robinson herself, the long-suffering translator who is “on the verge of tears” in her attempt to re-create the lyricism of the play. Her translation seemed to her like the “painted copy of a rose,” imitating the Greek text in a florid style “not in the least kompseuripikos,” without the flourish of Euripides. By amplifying the “faults of the original” (what Symonds called “the usual Euripidean blemishes”), she worried that she was writing in a style “untidy & wild,” shooting up like a beanstalk. Phaedra was troubling the translation, linking a transgression of style to sexual transgression, as if female sexuality might be growing out of control, and beyond the boundaries of the play. Robinson therefore left the translation to wither until November, when she reported to Symonds that one of his friends had offered help: I have seen something of your friend Mr. Fred Myers lately, for twice he has been to help me in correcting my half-done Hippolytus. He says it is pretty accurate, but does not quite fall in with my artistic views, which I fear I must modify. At all hazards I wanted to make it an English poem, written in a style natural to English readers, to call Demeter corn, Eros Love, & (sometimes) Zeus, God, to produce if possible the same natural Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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impression on modern readers as the original did on Greek hearers, to make it quite literal but not a crib—that was my never-realized Ideal. But Mr. Myers says this is over-strained, unscholarly, in some respects false; and I am beginning to think it a fit of youthful enthusiasm. (248 f.83) While Robinson wanted the translation that she had started in the English fields to be “written in a style natural to English readers” and “to produce if possible the same natural impression” as the original Greek, she was told her style seemed artificial: “overstrained” and “unscholarly” and perhaps even “false.” The ideal beauty of the play, as presented by Symonds, seemed a “never-realized Ideal” that she could not attain in a translation. But in circulating her “half-done Hippolytus” among friends Robinson must have made some impression on modern readers, as she was invited to publish an excerpt by University College London in their magazine. In a renewed fit of youthful enthusiasm, she wrote to Symonds in late November: Next month a scene out of the Hippolytus is coming out in the University Magazine as a sort of specimen. Please tell me quite frankly what you think of it. . . . Of course I feel a little excited to know what you will think (in fact very excited) but I am getting disgusted with the thing myself, so don’t be afraid of saying you are disappointed.—And if you think there is any merit or faithfulness or freshness in it, shall I finish it & bring it out next year? Please tell me what you really think. (248 ff.91–92) Despite her doubts, she hoped this excerpt—“a sort of specimen,” like a flower cut from the meadow of her Hippolytus translation—would have some of the “freshness in it” of the original text, or at least the scene she had imagined for its re-creation, in her “pastoral vision of translating that play out of doors” in the English meadows around Warwick. The scene she chose for publication was not Hippolytus praying to Artemis, however, but one of the lyrical speeches delivered by Phaedra pining away with desire for Hippolytus. “The specimen is called The Sickness of Phaedra,” Robinson wrote to Symonds; “I did not choose it as being best, but as the only part that would detach itself ” (248 f.92). But there was more at stake in this passage, as Robinson had sufficiently detached herself from Symonds to develop a different reading of the play, more focused on Phaedra. In her delirium, Phaedra echoes the description of the pure meadow, as a space where she would either be purified of her yearning for Hippolytus or find a way of being together with him. “Ah me!” cries Phaedra in Robinson’s translation, 170

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Fain would I draw me a draught of clear water Out of the little, springing well! Where in the grass of the meadow the poplar Grows, would I like and take my rest! The place worshipped by Hippolytus where “Reverence freshens with rivers’ dew the tended flowers” is here refigured as a meadow with spring water running through the grasses: a mimesis of his prayer that also works as erotic sublimation for Phaedra, a place to fulfill her desires and “take my rest.” Phaedra also yearns for escape into the mountains, as another Artemisian space where the hunting with (or of) Hippolytus can be refigured as sexual pursuit: Oh, send me away to the mountains. I go To the wood where the dogs, the hunters, Tread in the shade of the pines, Chasing the dappled deer. In these passages Robinson turns the figure of Phaedra to her own poetic purposes. By translating “the pure fresh health of the hunter-hero” (as imagined by Symonds) into the lyrical delirium of Phaedra, she also was transposing the language of masculine desire into other languages of feminine desire that might be associated (perhaps transgressively) with female aestheticism. Transforming Phaedra’s desire to be with Hippolytus into her own desire to translate Hippolytus, Robinson thus found a way of entering a new poetic territory. In translating the lyrical prayer of Hippolytus to Artemis, and the lyricized landscapes of Phaedra’s delirium, Robinson was eager to demonstrate her virtuosity as a lyric poet. The lyrical qualities of Euripidean drama had been praised by Symonds in Studies of the Greek Poets: “It has been well said, that the ear and not the eye was the chosen vehicle of pathos to the Greeks,” Symonds wrote, adding: “This remark is fully justified by the narrative passages in the plays of Euripides—passages of poetry unsurpassed for radiance, swiftness, strength, pictorial effect” (218). Euripides came after Aeschylus and Sophocles to represent a third generation of artists, who were, according to Symonds, “obliged to go afield for striking situations, to focus sentiment and pathos, to subordinate the harmony of the whole to the melody of the parts” (220). Euripides found inspiration for lyric poetry by going “afield” into elaborate pictorial descriptions with even more elaborate musical effects: “The lyrics of Euripides are among the choicest treasures of Greek poetry: they flow like mountain rivulets, flashing with sunbeams, eddying in cool shady places, Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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rustling through leaves of mint, forget-me-not, marsh-marigold and dock” (223). Here the lyrical flow of Euripides is compared to rivulets, “flashing” and “eddying” and “rustling” in poetic cadences that served, in turn, as inspiration for poets like Robinson. Throughout the nineteenth century Euripides had often been dismissed as an “effeminate” and “decadent” poet who marked the decline of Greek tragedy.22 Contrary to this critical tradition, Symonds went to great lengths in his chapter on “Greek Tragedy and Euripides” to defend the beauties of Euripidean style: It is hard, while still beneath the overshadowing presence of so great a master as Euripides, to have patience with the critics and scholars who scorn him—critics who cannot comprehend him, scholars who have not read him since they were at school. Decadence! Is their cry. Yet what would they have? . . . Why will they not be satisfied with beauty as luminous as that of a Greek statue or a Greek landscape, with feeling as profound as humanity itself, and with wisdom ‘musical as is Apollo’s lute.’ ” (242) Symonds turned the charge of “Decadence!” against Euripides into a defense of decadent aesthetics, resounding in poetry with greater variety of musical cadences. According to Symonds, “in the decadence of Greece it was not Aeschylus and Aristophanes, but Euripides” who was “learned and read and quoted” as the modern poet of his day (243), with the implication that Euripides might be learned and read and quoted again by modern-day readers during another period of decadence, in late Victorian England. Symonds concluded his chapter with a special appeal to modern poets: “It seems a strange neglect of good gifts to shut our ears to his pathetic melodies and ringing eloquence” (244). Robinson was one of those modern women poets who kept her ears open to the melodies of Euripidean style, recognizing that both the ear and the eye were the “chosen vehicle of pathos” for Greek tragedy. In translating Hippolytus, she tried to re-create the cadences of his poetry in the metrical modulations of her own poetic lines. With her first volume of poetry, A Handful of Honeysuckle, Robinson had already achieved a reputation for melodious versification. The Academy discovered in these early poems “lines, full of melody and sentiment,” an “abundance of music” and “the most touching lyrical cadence.”23 The Spectator also praised “the skill with which a somewhat difficult metre is handled,” lending to her lyrics a “sweet pathos, and sometimes a certain weird power.”24 172

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Even The Saturday Review (despite complaining that “when a lady introduces Greek names into verse she should be careful of her quantities”) found “in Miss Robinson’s book an unusual command of metrical language, much sense of the music of words, a power of making a scene visible, with plenty of colour and light on it.”25 These words of praise, reminiscent of Symonds praising Euripides, made Robinson seem uniquely qualified to do a metrical translation of Euripidean tragedy, demonstrating how Ladies’ Greek might look and sound with the accents. Without trying to match the patterns of classical quantitative verse exactly, Robinson used her reading of classical meters to expand the possibilities for writing English accentual verse. Her ear was carefully tuned to the rhythms of English poetry and often she worked out a metrical scheme before starting a poem, “writing lines in stress marks only, the words to be filled in later,” like composing a melody before the words (Van Zuyle 27). When she was translating Hippolytus, she wrote to Symonds that she had decided she would “turn the lyric speeches into unrhymed metre” (248 f.109), and in another letter she asked his advice about the metrical scheme she was trying to work out for the chorus: Tell me what you really think of it, if you see any merits or any faults that are not fundamental. Of the last it has several that I am aware of, not least my modernism of feeling that makes me incapable of doing justice to such a deity of Kupris. Then I have very little skill in classic meters. The Chorus is intended for an arrangement of Choriambs & Iambs, so. (Does it read like prose) (248 f.96) While conceding that her “modernism of feeling” might make her translation seem anachronistic, and her versification out of step with “classic meters,” she sketched out the metrical feet as she imagined them in English: a pattern of choriambs (four syllables, long-short-short-long) and iambs (two syllables, short-long). The marks she used for scansion indicated length rather than accentuation of syllables, but in her English translation she made the two forms of stress equivalent. She was trying to stretch English verse into longer lines on the model of classical meters, and although she worried that the passage might “read like prose,” she was eager to see if it could be made to work as a new kind of prosody (Figure 4.2). The passage that scans most closely according to the pattern in Robinson’s letter is her translation of the parodos, when the “Chorus of Troezenian Ladies” first enters the stage: Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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4.2 A. Mary F. Robinson, page from a letter to John Addington Symonds, December 3, 1879. Reproduced from Corréspondance de Mary Robinson (Fonds Anglais 248, folio 96). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Strophe A There is a rock dripping with springs out of the very sea, Sending adown from the tall cliff ’s crown Fountains that flow, so that therein dipped may the pitchers be. I have a friend; thither she went carrying purple gear, Drenching it through in the rivers’ dew, Out on the rocks, sunny and broad, letting it dry and clear. (CH 9) This choral passage marked the beginning of “The Sickness of Phaedra,” the excerpt from Robinson’s translation published in the University Magazine: simultaneously a vivid pictorial description and a virtuosic metrical performance. The chorus begins with an evocation of a pastoral scene, a flowing fountain where women come to dip their pitchers for water, in language that is also flowing. The first line, “There is a rock dripping with springs out of the very sea” is composed of three choriambs and an iamb (as diagrammed in Robinson’s letter), creating a syncopated melody more complex than the more 174

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straightforward movement of dactyls that we might expect in English verse. In the third line is another metrical syncopation: the first choriamb (“Fountains that flow”) pauses briefly after “flow,” literally and figuratively stopping the flow of the verse before continuing with the second choriamb (“so that therein”), while the third choriamb leads without interruption directly into the final iamb (“dipped may the pitchers be”). Following the rules of choral responsion, the antistrophe matches the metrical pattern of the strophe, echoing its melody while marking a thematic contrast. This stanza moves from the description of a sunny scene out in nature to a description of Phaedra hidden from the sun, suffering indoors with a veil shrouding her head and her mouth parched with drought:

Antistrophe A First from my friend heard I the news how on a fevered bed, Wasted with pain, hath Phaedra lain Sick in the house, under a veil shrouding her golden head. This is to-day third of the days since she persists to close Foodless, in drouth, her ambrosial mouth; Death is her choice, on to that goal urged by her secret woes. (CH 9–10) In contrast to the syncopated flow of the strophe, the syntax of the antistrophe works with the alternation of choriambs and iambs to create a more halting effect, marking the time of Phaedra’s suffering in carefully measured phrases: “This is to-day” (choriamb) followed by “third of the days” (choriamb) and “since she persists” (choriamb), and ending with “to close” (iamb). These measures are so well established by the final line (“Death is her choice, on to that goal urged by her secret woes”) that the predetermination of her death seems metrically overdetermined as well, urging Phaedra to the end of her life, and the end of the poetic line, as her “goal.” By creating her own metrical effects, Robinson struck a balance between literal and free translation, adapting Greek melody to English meter and English melody to Greek meter. The choral odes allowed Robinson to play out different metrical systems, aestheticizing and sometimes even thematizing this interplay of meters. For example, the famous choral ode addressed to Eros is a self-conscious performance of metrical (de)cadence: O Love! O Love! From the eyes of thee Droppeth desire, and into the soul Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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That thou conquerest leadest thou sweetness and charm; Come not to me bringing sorrow or harm, And come not in dole, Nor with measureless passion o’ermaster thou me! (CH 30) The chorus, praying that it will never fall under the influence of eros, tries to find the right measures for the articulation of this “measureless passion.” The alternation of iambs and anapests in this passage suggests the descending cadences of desire as it drops into the soul, causing erotic turmoil. The tension between these different rhythms corresponds to the paradox of desire bringing both “sweetness” and “sorrow,” and gives metrical form to this internal conflict. Symonds once commented in a letter to Robinson on a general tendency in her verse to displace iambs more familiar to the English ear. “I doubt whether your anapaestic lines in the iambic stanzas are always successful,” he wrote. “They seem to me to have driven the iambic rhythm so far away, that it becomes intrusive on our ear.” The denaturalization of iambic rhythm may sound strange in other poems by Robinson, but in her translation of this choral passage, it is a deliberate intrusion on the ear as a metrical performance of the disordering effects of eros. A more harmonious anapestic meter is used by Robinson in another choral passage, one of the famous Euripidean “escape odes” in which the chorus wishes to fly away like a bird from the tragic death of Phaedra: O, I would that I were in the smooth hollow places of rocks! Were I set by a god as a bird in the light-winged flocks I am eager to wander on wings and to soar Over-seas to the far Hadriatic shore. (CH 41) Here anapests take over to create greater momentum in the ode, and with this metrical acceleration the chorus enacts how it is “eager to wander on wings and to soar” like “a bird in the light-winged flocks”: a trope for lyric poetry, moving beyond earth-bound tragic meters into the air-borne melodies of birds. Thus the chorus articulates its wish to cross over to a distant shore, where human language is transformed into birdsong, and meter could become a purely musical performance. This flight into an ideal realm could perhaps be understood in terms of an “immaterial poetics” that came to characterize Robinson’s lyrics in general. Ana Vadillo has argued that Robinson’s lyric impulse was a movement toward disembodied abstraction that Vernon Lee once described as a “quality of voice rare, aetherial, singing in an altogether higher stratum of atmosphere, coming out of 176

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what seems an immaterial throat.”26 Such idealization of music was a familiar (utopian) topos within decadent aesthetics, associated with Pater when he wrote that all arts aspire to the condition of music, and later articulated by Arthur Symons in “The Decadent Movement in Literature” in 1893. Even before Symons and Pater formalized this musical impulse, Robinson was already performing it in her own metrical experiments. But if Robinson aspired to music as a medium for the conversion of physical voice into spiritual song, this aspiration could only materialize in metrical form and had to be visualized, as we have seen, in marking the meter of her translation. Rather than dissolving lyric into pure song, she sought to make it legible as a material effect of metrical translation. Robinson often wrote to Symonds about her passion for music—one of the first poems she sent for his perusal was “A Passion of Music” (248 f.9)—and she described to him “the intense pleasure, beyond reason, one gets from combinations of harmony in music” (248 f.75). She thanked Symonds for noting her interest in music and expressed surprise that other critics “took no note of my passion for it. Sometimes I think it is the one real thing in life. All the same I have not much music ‘in my hands’ and I think few people who heard me sing would guess how dearly I love it” (248 f.74). Although Robinson did not sing or play a musical instrument, she perceived meter musically, and music was a recurring theme in many of the new poems collected in The Crowned Hippolytus. For example, in “During Music” she wrote: “Hark! What rapturous vital air of music, / What strong harmony utters things unuttered.” Hearing music, like reading Greek or writing poetry, was a way for Robinson to utter things unuttered, articulating a “real thing” in metrical form. Indeed we might think of the melodic manipulation of meters in her translation of Euripides as a prelude to melody of her own poems. Recalling from Symonds that “the ear and not the eye was the chosen vehicle of pathos for the Greeks,” she learned to tune the musical instrument of her verse by translating ancient Greek. Such an appeal to the ear, mediated by Greek translation and modulated in a metrical performance, is amplified in Robinson’s poem, “An Address to the Nightingale.” Translated from The Birds of Aristophanes and published along with other new poems in The Crowned Hippolytus, this exquisite lyric can be read as Robinson’s palinode to the escape odes of Euripidean tragedy. Instead of flying away with the birds to a distant shore, as the chorus imagines in Hippolytus, Robinson invites the nightingale to come near: O dear one, with tawny wings Dearest of singing things, Whose hymns my company have been Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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Thou art come, thou art come, thou art seen! Bid, with the music of thy voice, Sweet-sounding rustler, the heart rejoice; Ah! louder, louder, louder sing, Flute out the language of the spring; Nay, let those low notes rest, Oh! my nightingale, nightingale, trill out thy anapaest! (CH 187) The poem performs the song of the nightingale in the very act of addressing it: the music is made visible by marking and naming anapests that are “seen” in the song of the bird: “thou art come, thou art come, thou art seen!” Through this repetition of anapests the trilling sounds of the nightingale are figured as a revelation of lyric song, and the very word “nightingale” is transfigured into anapests in the syncopated final line: “Oh! my nightingale, nightingale, trill out thy anapaest!” To heighten the lyrical effect of these anapestic lines, other rhythms are introduced as well, such as iambs in “Ah! louder, louder, louder sing,” and spondees in “Nay, let those low notes rest.” But instead of creating metrical tension, as in the conflict of iambs and anapests in the apostrophe to Eros from Euripides, the meters here are harmonized into a melodious musical cadence, rising upward rather than falling downward: not dissolving into the abstraction of immaterial poetics, but amplifying the musicality of the poem as a “real thing,” reified and reiterated in the invocation to the nightingale as “dearest singing thing.” When Robinson sent a draft of this Aristophanic translation to Symonds, she wondered “Is the repetition too Euripidesque?” (248 f.56). Perhaps she was referring not only to the repetition of words and phrases in this poem but also more generally to the assimilation of Euripidean lyricism into her own poetry: was it original or too much of a repetition? Did her poetry sound and look too much like Euripides, or did Euripides sound and look too much like her poetry? She debated back and forth about publishing the translation of Hippolytus with or without her own poems, unsure of what kind of poetic claim to make as a translator. On the one hand, she felt she would be taken more seriously as a poet if she published her own poetry along with her translation: “I don’t know whether to add a few of my later poems. If I did a great many more people would read Hippolytus, friends of mine who don’t take much interest in Euripides, and I should rather like to publish something more serious than my Honeysuckle” (248 ff.112–113). On the other hand, her publisher felt that the translation should be independent from her poetry. “I can not make up my mind about my book. Everyone wants me to publish poems with the play, but Mr. Paul agrees with me that Hippolytus is best alone” (248 f.122). 178

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Robinson’s decision, finally, to publish her version of Hippolytus as a prelude to her own verse suggests that each should be read in relation to the other. By presenting the translation first in the volume, followed by her poems, she invited readers to read her poetry through the lens of Euripides and Euripides through the lens of her poetry. A review in The Athenaeum noted that she had “produced a careful and extremely pleasing version of the ‘Hippolytus’ of Euripides,” distinguished not by literal accuracy but by Robinson’s ability to turn it into an English poem that she herself might have written: Here, as in her other verses, Miss Robinson displays that felicity of language, that real, even if occasionally misled, sense of style, which she, almost alone among contemporaries of her own sex, undeniably possesses. Her ‘Hippolytus’ is an English poem and may be accepted as such by the English reader. This is itself a success. As to the merits of the play as a translation, they are considerable, and we do not know that we are quite justified in demanding a more literal accuracy. If Miss Robinson errs, it is in the direction of raffinirung, of prettifying her original.27 The “prettification” of the original was a measure of Robinson’s decadent style, which the Athenaeum reviewer alternately admired (as in “fine passages, like the first speech of Hippolytus”) and criticized (“Miss Robinson’s not infrequent failure to cast her choruses in a harmonious form of English verse”). Nevertheless the review concluded that “Miss Robinson’s version will satisfy the English reader and bring the student back to his Greek.” Of course the point of Robinson’s translation was that it could bring the student back to her Greek, as well. With The Crowned Hippolytus, Robinson demonstrated (like Elizabeth Barrett Browning) how to reconcile “in her woman’s heart the scholar’s knowledge and the poet’s mind.” Although she was criticized for an overly florid feminine style—“prettifying her original”— her metrical translation of Euripides introduced new kind of musicality into women’s verse. Many of Robinson’s female contemporaries read these metrical experiments as an exemplary reinvention of lyric song; for example, Hannah Lynch (Robinson’s ardent advocate) considered her “a singer of rare and precious art” and singled out The Crowned Hippolytus as “a singularly melodious rendering of Euripides into English verse” (261). Robinson’s Greek translation also earned her a place in the 1894 Library of the World’s Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, where she was praised for reviving an ancient tongue, no longer spoken, in the living melody of her verse: Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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Her polished and lovely verse indicates reading, and the absorption of the riches of the literary past of her own and other tongues. . . . But her talent is independent: her note is distinct enough to justify all her contact with the great spirits of literature; and the chastened classic quality of some of her song in no wise detracts from the modernness of her mind. For a certain refined melancholy she is thoroughly a modern. (Warner 12315) Even while Robinson’s poetry “indicates reading” (both her own and ours), it is figured as music that appeals with “her note” and “her song” to the ear of the reader: a new musical form, simultaneously “classic” and “modern.”28 Starting her literary career as one of the women poets of the 1870s, but moving increasingly toward prose by the end of the nineteenth century, how modern was Robinson? During her classical studies at UCL, Professor Goodwin had suggested that Robinson’s approach to Greek might be “too modern” and perhaps too much “on the sensuous and poetic side” (248 f.49). And Robinson herself, as we have seen in her letter to Symonds (figure 2), worried that her “modernism of feeling” might be a fundamental fault in her translation of Hippolytus, especially in “doing justice to such a deity of Kupris.” The overwhelming power of Aphrodite (Cypris) is proclaimed in the prologue of Robinson’s translation: “Mighty am I to men, / a goddess known by many names” (3). But in corresponding with Symonds (who leaned more toward the “sensuous and poetic side” of Greek than Goodwin would allow), Robinson was able to translate Euripides into a highly eroticized, aestheticized idiom that would do justice to her own idea of Greek eros, mighty to all, women and men. Accentuating the rhythms of desire that she discovered in the play, Robinson justified her translation as a metrical experiment as well: through the interplay of choriambs and iambs, she evoked Euripidean choral meter in the cadences of English poetry.29 While some of her contemporaries may have found this metrical translation “unscholarly” and “overstrained,” Robinson made it possible to imagine new melodies for English meter by trilling out her anapests. Thus, looking back to lyric strains of the nineteenth century, and looking forward to a strenuous reinvention of lyricism in the twentieth century, Robinson made her literary mark by writing Ladies’ Greek “with” the accents.

H.D.’s Euripides: Feet, Feet, Feet, Feet Three decades after Robinson had published The Crowned Hippolytus in London, H.D. was making her own mark on literary history by translating Euripides. She had arrived in London in 1911, and (like Robinson) devoted many 180

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hours in the Reading Room of the British Museum to poring over editions and translations of ancient Greek poetry. Along with her reading of Sapphic fragments and Hellenistic poems in the Greek Anthology during the early years of her poetic career, H.D. approached Euripides first and foremost as a “lyric” poet: she called him “a white rose, lyric, feminine, a spirit.”30 By the end of the nineteenth century, this idealization was increasingly common in readings of Euripidean tragedy, especially by women, and H.D. continued the process of feminizing and lyricizing Euripides by translating Euripidean (de)cadence into cadences that would look and sound like a modern idea(l) of lyric. Working side by side in the British Library with Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington— former lover and current husband, both interested in modernizing ancient Greek to “make it new”—H.D. defined herself as new woman poet by training her eye on the lyric meters of Euripides and transforming his choral odes into modernist verse. Rather than performing a modernist “break” from Victorian verse, however, H.D.’s Euripides also reflects back on nineteenth-century versions of Euripidean tragedy, not so much “making it new” but continuing the Victorian legacy of “making it Greek” in a new way. The life-long importance of Euripides in H.D.’s Hellenism has been explored by various critics, most fully by Eileen Gregory, who demonstrates how “H.D.’s major exchanges with Euripides over the course of a lifetime are sites of enactment as well as of analysis and contemplation, allowing her a way to reflect imaginatively upon erotic and spiritual trajectories to which she was committed.”31 Tracing the multiple trajectories of H.D.’s “classic lines,” Gregory raises “the question of classical lineage and the problematic status of a woman within the traditionally male domain of classical letters”; according to Gregory, “because true descent in modern classicism is imagined as patrilineal, H.D. is faced with a pressing necessity to delineate her classical affiliation in alternative terms” (5). Thus H.D. found a “queer” lineage within late Victorian Hellenism, further elaborated in the critical work of Diana Collecott and Cassandra Laity. But in reading H.D. in relation to fin-de-siècle decadent aesthetics, critics have not yet taken into consideration the previous generation of female aesthetes, including Robinson. While H.D. may or may not have known about Robinson’s Euripides, certainly she was familiar with Vernon Lee, and certainly she had read the defense of Euripidean tragedy by Symonds, along with nineteenthcentury versions of the Hippolytus myth by Swinburne and Pater, all of whom were familiar to Robinson as well as H.D.32 My juxtaposition of Robinson and H.D. demonstrates a broader intertextuality at work in the reception of Hippolytus, especially as more women were reading, rewriting, and performing this tragedy by the end of the century.33 Rather than being excluded from Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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“the traditionally male domain of classical letters,” as Gregory suggests, these women were aligned with an ever-expanding female domain of classical letters that H.D. also sought to enter by translating Euripides. The first translations of Euripides published by H.D. were choruses from Iphigeneia in Aulis, a tragedy that H.D. had seen performed in ancient Greek by students at the University of Pennsylvania in 1904, with Pound in the chorus. As H.D. later recalled, she was “awakened” to Greek tragedy by this metrical recitation of ancient Greek: “I felt I had heard Greek at last.”34 But H.D.’s recreation of Greek choral meter in English poetry was more of a textual production, intended for the eye as much as the ear. In her translator’s note, she explained that she would avoid “a rhymed, languidly Swinburnean verse form” and that “the rhymeless hard rhythms used in the present version would be most likely to keep the sharp edges and irregular cadence of the original.”35 Although Greek choral meters are in fact carefully patterned (in choral responsion, with precise repetition of metrical patterns between strophes), in her “present version” of Euripides H.D. sought to re-present the seemingly “irregular cadence” of these odes in the broken lines of her own free verse. The uneven stanzas of her translation created a striking visual effect on the page, breaking up longer phrases into shorter lines of different lengths, with frequent enjambments and occasional use of dashes or colons to separate one line from the next. Her translator’s note further explained that she would avoid the repetition of “useless, ornamental adjectives” in Greek, because they were “a heavy strain on a translator’s ingenuity”; instead her own translation strained to reinvent a different kind of lyricism by paring the language of Euripides down into a spare English idiom. Rather than offering a “literal, word-for-word version of so well-known an author as Euripides,” H.D. created an abbreviated and condensed version of his choral odes that would look less familiar, more strange to modern readers. Of course her own principles of poetic composition were already well known, famously proclaimed by Pound in announcing “Imagism” and H.D. as “Imagiste” in 1912, and frequently reiterated in the pages of The Egoist where H.D. published her early poems. Growing out of two feminist periodicals (The Freewoman in 1911, and The New Freewoman in 1913), The Egoist was taken over by Aldington and his circle in 1914 to edit a periodical dedicated to new literary developments. In 1915 a “Special Imagist Issue” of The Egoist announced yet again the four cardinal principles of Imagism: “(1) Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective of objective. (2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. (3) As regarding rhythm, to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. (4) The ‘doctrine of the Image.’ ”36 Although the doctrine of the visual image remained 182

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somewhat obscure, H.D.’s verbal idiom was often cited as the clearest example of Imagism by the Imagists themselves, as they praised her poetry for “hard, direct treatment, absolutely personal rhythm, few and expressive adjectives, no inversions, and a keen emotion presented objectively.”37 However, the “absolutely personal rhythm” in H.D. was also another way to approach the reading and writing of meter. H.D.’s poems (including her translations of Euripides) were not written in regular meters—“not in sequence of the metronome”—but rather created a polymetrical effect through the manipulation of variable feet in short, syncopated lines: “a queer swift cadence” Aldington called it in his 1914 essay, “Free Verse in England.”38 Differentiating the new free verse (or what he called “poems in unrhymed cadence”) from “old rhymed, accented verse,” Aldington insisted that modern poetry should invent new cadences instead of following a “preconceived” pattern of rhymes and accents: “Free verse permits the poet all his individuality because he creates his cadence instead of copying other people’s, all his accuracy because with his cadence flowing naturally he tends to write naturally and therefore with precision, and all his style because style consists in concentration, and exactness which could only be obtained rarely in the old forms” (351). To free poets from the “old forms” of English accentual verse, Aldington paradoxically invoked the even older forms of classical quantitative verse as a model for transforming modern poetry into more “natural” cadences; he claimed (somewhat tendentiously) that “the best Greek poets” and even “the Attic dramatists in their lyric choruses used a kind of free verse” (351). Even more than Pound’s ideas about Imagism (which H.D. herself soon abandoned), Aldington’s ideas about free verse prompted her early translation of choruses from Euripides, suggesting the transformation of “accents” into “cadences” that might seem simultaneously ancient and modern. With these principles of prosody in mind, Aldington had announced a project to publish translations from Greek and Latin in The Poets’ Translation Series, done by various poets for The Egoist and reprinted in pamphlets. According to the advertisement for the series, classical literature needed to be revived in a more vividly modern poetic idiom: This literature has too long been the property of pedagogues, philologists, and professors. Its human qualities have been obscured by the wranglings of grammarians, who love it principally because to them it is so safe and so dead. But to many of us it is not dead. It is more alive, more essential, more human than anything we can find in contemporary English literature. The publication of such classics, in the way we propose, may help to create a higher standard for poetry than that which prevails, and a higher Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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standard of appreciation of the writers of antiquity, who have suffered too long at the hands of clumsy metrists.39 As an alternative to translations by “clumsy metrists,” H.D. was featured in The Poets’ Translation Series to reclaim Euripides from pedagogues, philologists, professors, and grammarians and make him seem “more alive” in modern verse. Her choruses from Iphigenia in Aulis were published in 1916 as part of the first series, and again in 1919 as part of the second series, along with choruses from Hippolytus. Aldington admired H.D.’s selections from Hippolytus even more, as he wrote to her in a letter: “This is a very lovely translation, unique, personal, vivid. No one but you could have done it . . . I think this translation an improvement on the Iphigeneia.”40 In translating Hippolytus, H.D. lyricized Euripides by selecting mostly choral passages from the Greek text and arranging them into a sequence of seven poems.41 The final poem in the sequence is a lyrical translation of the fourth choral ode, invoking the goddess Aphrodite as Kupris and evoking the universal power of eros: Men you strike and the gods’ dauntless spirits alike, and Eros helps you, O Kupris, with wings’ swift interplay of light: now he flies above the earth, now above sea-crash and whirl of salt: he enchants beasts who dwell in the hills and shoals in the sea-depth: he darts gold wings maddening their spirits: he charms all born of earth, (all of whom Helios visits fiery with light) and men’s hearts: you alone, Kupris, creator of all life, reign absolute. (CP 93) 184

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Breaking up her lines to create the look of free verse, H.D. reproduced the seemingly irregular arrangement of the choral ode on the page as it appeared in her Greek edition, and she tried to produce some of its metrical effects as well, through a careful manipulation of her own poetic cadences.42 In the Greek text, this choral ode comes after a dramatic speech (not translated by H.D.) that narrates the horrific entanglement of Hippolytus in the reins of his chariot, thus fulfilling his own name: “undone by horses.” In marked contrast to the iambic trimeter of this messenger speech, the lyric meters of the ode in Greek suggest the agitation of the chorus, in a pattern of recurring dochmiacs (short short short long) combined with an occasional choriamb (long short short long). Without creating an exact equivalent in English to Greek choral meter, H.D.’s translation also moves between iambic and triple meters, using variable feet to create more complex cadences. Embedded in her “free verse” is a pattern of choriambs, beginning with phrases like “spirits alike,” “flies above earth,” “now above sea,” “he enchants beasts,” “dwell in the hills,” “shoals in the sea,” “all born of earth,” “fiery with light,” and culminating in the dramatic choriamb of the final line: “reign absolute.” By avoiding the regularity of iambic verse, H.D accentuated the absolute power of Kupris in striking accents, beginning in line 1 with “Men you strike” and continuing in an interplay of rhythms that seem to move as swiftly as the flight of Eros, “with wings’ swift / interplay of light” (lines 5–6). H.D. condensed several Greek adjectives for Eros—“the one with flashing wings” (poikilopteros) and “with very swift wings” (oktato pteroi)—into a single phrase to present the “light” movement of Eros as a rhythmic effect simultaneously seen and heard. This rhythm is brought even more vividly into the present tense through the repetition of “now,” inserted by H.D. in her English translation instead of “and” in Greek: “now he flies above earth / now above sea-crash.” The Greek description of Eros as “feathered” (ptanos) and “shining like gold” (chrusophaes) is also succinctly phrased by H.D. in a single line, “he darts gold wings,” where each syllable seems to have its own strong accent. What kind of metrical feet might convey the rapid motion of these fluttering wings? The free verse of H.D.’s translation deregulates metrical norms in order to recreate the unruly effect of Eros on the minds of men, “maddening their spirits.” As Eros “enchants” and “charms all born of earth,” striking everywhere, the erotic force of Aphrodite is strikingly felt in the rhythms of this translation. Around the time when she was working on choruses from Hippolytus, H.D. wrote in a notebook that “certain words and lines of Attic choruses . . . have a definite, hypnotic effect on me.”43 She tried to recreate this hypnotic effect in her own versification not only when she translated the enchantment of eros in the Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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Euripidean ode to Kupris, but also when she translated the Euripidean “escape ode” where the chorus wishes to fly away like a bird. The first two stanzas of this translation (number 5 in H.D.’s choral sequence) resonate thematically and rhythmically with the description of Eros darting over the earth on swift wings: O for wings, swift, a bird, set of God among the bird-flocks! I would dart from some Adriatic precipice across its wave-shallows and crests, to Eradanus’ river-source; to the place where his daughters weep, thrice-hurt for Phaeton’s sake tears of amber and gold which dart their fire through the purple surface. I would seek the song-haunted Hesperides and the apple-trees set above the sand-drift: there the god of the purple marsh lets no ships pass; he marks the sky-space which Atlas keeps— that holy place where streams, fragrant as honey pass to the couches spread in the palace of Zeus: there the earth-spirit, source of bliss, grants the gods happiness. (CP 90–91) Like the rapid rhythm of “Men you strike,” this ode repeats a pattern of stresses, this time embedding not choriambs but cretics (long short long) in her own 186

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verse: “O for wings,” “swift, a bird,” “set of God,” “I would dart,” “I would seek,” “there the god,” and “source of bliss.” Thus H.D. presented this ode as hypnotizing rhythmic incantation, written mostly in short dimeter and trimeter lines, with occasional longer lines to measure out the distance that the chorus would fly to escape the tragedy: “from some Adriatic precipe / across its wave-shallows and crests / to Eradanus’ river source.” In contrast to Robinson who translated this escape ode into regular anapests (“I am eager to wander on wings and to soar / Over-seas to the far Hadriatic shore”), H.D. created her own musical cadences by breaking up the regularity of Victorian verse and visualizing the ode as an “Imagist” poem with irregular lines of verse. Her imagination of “songhaunted Hesperides” seems to appeal as much to the eye as the ear, not only in her variable alineation of the poem on the page, but in her emphasis on visual description that leaves the reader with images of “amber and gold” and “purple surface.” Through these early translations from Hippolytus, H.D. tried to create a vivid vision of a world both within and beyond the tragedy, as she noted in an unpublished essay on Euripides: The lines of this Greek poet . . . are today as vivid and fresh as they ever were. I know that we need scholars to decipher and interpret the Greek, but that we also need poets and mystics and children to rediscover this Hellenic world, to see through the words: the words being but the outline, the architectural structure of that door or window, through which we are all free, scholar and unlettered alike, to pass. We emerge from our restricted minds . . . into a free, large, clear, vibrant, limitless realm, sky and sea and distant islands.44 The choral odes from Hippolytus were H.D.’s own escape into a world seemingly beyond words. She translated the Euripidean text not as a scholar to “decipher and interpret the Greek,” but as a poet who would “see through the words” and invite all readers (even those “unlettered” in Greek) to pass through her free verse translation into a “limitless realm” where “we emerge from our restricted minds.” Although H.D.’s English version might look more “free” than Robinson’s versification of Euripides, it had a similar poetic purpose: like Robinson, H.D. translated Greek in order to open up new possibilities for transforming poetry in English. In this respect, H.D.’s was writing in the tradition of the Woman of Greek Letters, making a claim to female classical literacy as another performance of Ladies’ Greek, and turning herself into a medium for the transmission of Classics. Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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Along with Aldington and Pound and other literary figures associated with The Egoist, T. S Eliot contributed to this idea of H.D. as a modern embodiment of ancient Greek. In a 1916 review entitled “Classics in English,” T. S. Eliot singled her out for “bringing something out of the Greek language into the English, in an immediate contact which gives life to both, the contact which makes it possible for the modern language perpetually to draw sustenance from the dead.”45 Eliot’s notion that modern poetry would come to life by drawing “sustenance from the dead” also implied that the dead language might in fact be more alive than the living: with ancient Greek giving “life to both,” H.D. was as much revived by Euripides as Euripides was revived by H.D. For Eliot, H.D.’s Euripides was part of a broader revival of classics by poets who could serve as “perfect medium” between the living and the dead and so bring the past into present and the present into the past, as he went on to elaborate in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919).46 Precisely because she was a poet and not a classical scholar, H.D. seemed a better medium for Greek than Professor Gilbert Murray, whose translations of Euripidean tragedy were lambasted by Eliot in 1920 because of their Victorian versification. While “Professor Murray has simply interposed between Euripides and ourselves a barrier more impenetrable than the Greek language,” according to Eliot, “the choruses from Euripides by H. D. are, allowing for errors and even occasional omissions of difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and English than Mr. Murray’s.” It seemed to Eliot that H.D. had transposed Euripides into a living verse form that was her own creation, in contrast to the Swinburnean cadences “interposed” by Murray in translating from Greek to English: “it is because Professor Murray has no creative instinct that he leaves Euripides quite dead,” Eliot concluded.47 Widely respected as a classical scholar and a man of letters, Murray was displaced by the new woman of letters in one fell swoop. And yet H.D. had learned much from Victorian translators of Euripides, especially Murray. In a letter enumerating the nineteenth-century writers she had read as a schoolgirl (including Pater and Wilde, and “Swinburne out of school”) H.D. recalled: “Yes, I read a very little Greek and what possible translations there were—Gilbert Murray’s prose rather than his poetry.”48 By the time she had learned to read more Greek and started to translate Euripides, Murray was turning from scholarly editions and prose renditions to more popular versions of Euripidean tragedy, advertised as “Translations into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes,” and increasingly used for staging productions. His ambition was “to put before English readers a translation of some very beautiful poetry” and it is more than coincidence that the first of his verse translations was Hippolytus (1902), chosen for its particular beauty. In his Translator’s 188

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Preface, Murray explained that his method was based on “close study of the letter and careful tracking of the spirit by means of its subtleties,” but he also sought to free himself from literal translation in order to recreate “the music of the original”: “I have laboured long to express a slight shade of meaning or of beauty which I felt lurking in some particular word or cadence.”49 Although Murray’s free translation of the play did not take the form of free verse, his insistence on the musical “cadence” of Euripides was an important influence on H.D., notwithstanding Eliot’s scathing critique. Like Murray, H.D. “laboured long” to reveal the beauty lurking in particular words or cadences from the Hippolytus. In addition to translating the choral odes for her 1919 sequence, she transformed several speeches by Hippolytus and Phaedra into lyric poems, detached from their dramatic context. Beginning with an invocation (“Daemon initiate, spirit / of the god-race, Artemis”), the first poem in her 1919 translations is the prayer of Hippolytus to Artemis: Of all maids, loveliest, I greet you, Artemis, loveliest upon Olympus: dearest, to you this gift, flower set by flower and leaf, broken by uncut grass, where neither scythe has dipped nor does the shepherd yet venture to lead his sheep; there it is white and fragrant, the wild-bee swirls across; as a slow rivulet, mystic peace broods and drifts: Ah! But my own, my dearest, take for your gold-wrought locks from my hands these flowers as from a spirit. (CP 85) Delivered in Greek as a dramatic speech in regular iambic trimeter, this passage is lyricized by H.D. in variable three-foot lines that flow in English “as a slow rivulet” to evoke the sacred precinct of Artemis. While H.D. avoided the Victorian diction and rhymed versification of these lines by Murray (“Where never shepherd leads his grazing ewes / Nor scythe has touched. Only the river dews / Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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Gleam, and the spring bee sings, and in the glade / Hath Solitude her mystic garden made”50), she retained his adjective “mystic” as a climactic word in her own translation: after “mystic peace broods and drifts,” she inserted a colon and a stanza break. The final lines of the prayer, delivered “as from a spirit” to the “spirit” of Artemis, seem to spiritualize Hippolytus so that he is no longer a dramatic character but suspended in the eternal present of his prayer. H.D. followed Murray in “careful tracking of the spirit” in translating the Greek text, in order to discover the “spirit” in the letter and so turn Euripides into an inspiration for poets in the modern age. In Euripides and His Age (1913), Murray declared that Euripides is “of special interest to our own generation,” and he compared the tragedian to English poets like Swinburne, “whose works are full of intellectual rebellion while their technique is exquisite and elaborate.”51 The elaboration of Swinburnean cadences in Murray’s translation of Euripides resonated with H.D.’s versification as well. Although her lines appear short on the page, if we read past the enjambments, her Euripides begins to look and sound more like Swinburne. We might conjecture a change of alineation in her translation of the prayer to Artemis, as follows: Of all maids, loveliest, I greet you, Artemis, Loveliest upon Olympus: dearest, to you this gift, flower set by flower and leaf, broken by uncut grass, where neither scythe has dipped nor does the shepherd yet venture to lead his sheep: there it is white and fragrant, the wild-bee swirls across; as a slow rivulet, mystic peace broods and drifts. Read in longer lines, H.D’s verse hovers between iambic pentameter and the triple rhythms (dactyls and anapests) that are a distinctive feature of Swinburne’s versification. H.D. was familiar with Swinburne’s poetry from her studies at Bryn Mawr College, and from the young Pound who had a penchant for reciting long passages from Swinburne (and his own Swinburnean imitations) to the young Hilda Doolittle. H.D. recalled these years in HERmione, an autobiographical novel (more like an extended prose poem) about H.D.’s breakdown after dropping out of Bryn Mawr. Here George (reminiscent of Pound) keeps chanting the memorable chorus from Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon (“ ‘The hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,’ repeated George Lowndes”), and Hermione (or “Her,” reminiscent of H.D.) is relentlessly pursued by this rhythm (“the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces caught up to Her”).52 The narrative begins with 190

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Hermione frantically running in circles (while her mind “trod its round” so also “her feet went on,” 4) and it ends with her running through a meadow in the snow (“her track was uneven and one footprint seemed always to trail unsteadily. . . . Now her feet seemed to be filled with memories and the soles of her swift feet,” 224). In her delirium she embodies all the symptoms of hysteria, as Susan Stanford Friedman points out in a psychoanalytic reading of HERmione: “Hermione’s feet are a mute form of speech as they act out the repetitive, rhythmic, visual discourse of her consciousness” (112). But these passages also suggest an allegorical reading of meter. Hermione’s running feet “act out” the rhythm of Swinburne’s metrical feet, with the speed of his triple meters re-enacted in H.D.’s rhythmic prose: Run on and on, run on and on Hermione. You are doomed Hermione for the message you carry is in forgotten meters . . . run, stripped across snowbanks, fly downward with pulse beating and pummeling veins at either side of a burning forehead; beating, beating, run, run Hermione. Pheidippides run, run. (220) While she runs like the hounds of spring on winter’s traces, Hermione also imagines herself to be like the Greek messenger Pheidippides, bearing a torch (lampadephoros) and running to his death from Marathon to Athens. In her own marathon, the Swinburnean meters she has memorized are associated with “forgotten meters” in a dead language that itself “dead, dead or forgotten”: You know running and running and running that the messenger will take (lampadephoros) your message in its fervour and you will sink down exhausted . . . run, run Hermione. For the message-bearer next in line has turned against you . . . dead, dead or forgotten. (220) Tracking the traces of her own traumatized memory, the hysterical Hermione is “doomed” to carry a message that she does not remember, and can only repeat in metrical form. The displacement of memory by the memorization of meter is a recurring motif that runs throughout HERmione. Hermione’s obsessive repetition of “Itylus,” another Swinburnean poem that serves as a figure for mute speech, further plays out the paradox of remembering as a form of forgetting. And when Hermione shows George her first attempts at poetry, he tells her “this is writing” but “it’s like the choriambics of a forgotten Melic” (149). This too is a phrase that keeps repeating in Hermione’s mind, as she resolves to write more poems: Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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“I was going to work and I was going to work and I was going to work. George called them forgotten lyrics of a lost Melic or iambics of a forgotten Melic. I have forgotten. I am the lost iambics of a forgotten Melic” (205). It seems that the rhythms of English verse—and especially the meters of Swinburne—have been transposed into the “choriambic” measures of Greek lyric and superimposed on Hermione herself, who becomes the very embodiment of this rhythm: “I am the lost iambics,” she puns, turning “I am” into the forgotten “iamb” of a scattered self that she is struggling to remember by writing poetry. Not until the final paragraph of her restless narrative does Hermione finally, tentatively, begin to find her own feet: “Feet pulsed forward, drove Her homeward, her feet were winged with the winged god’s sandal” (234). My brief excursus on this metrical allegory, developed in more detail by H.D. in writing HERmione, suggests how much her reading of Greek was intertwined with her early reading of Swinburne. The translations of Hippolyus published by H.D. in 1919—the choral odes as well as the lyricized speeches of Phaedra and Hippolytus—follow the traces of Swinburne’s metrical feet, in one way or another, sometimes formally by echoing the triple meters of Swinburne, sometimes more thematically by echoing passages from his poetry. The fourth poem of the sequence, for example, sounds distinctly Swinburnean in H.D.’s translation of Phaedra’s lament. As another woman suffering from delirium, Phaedra projects her desire for Hippolytus into the sacred precincts of Artemis, where he hunts with the swift-footed hunting goddess: the mountains (“where hounds athirst for death, / leap on the bright stags!”) and the sea-coast (“trodden of swift feet . . . where I might mount with goad and whip / the horses,” CP 88). Thus, recalling yet again the hounds of spring on winter’s traces, H.D. translated Swinburne’s cadences both into and out of Euripides. Two years later, H.D. published “Hippolytus Temporizes” (1921), a poem that serves as an epilogue to her earlier translations of Hippolytus as well as a prologue to her later verse drama, Hippolytus Temporizes (1927). The second stanza makes even more explicit the metrical allegory that transposes the worship of Artemis into the worship of feet, as Hippolytus proclaims: I worship the feet, the flawless, that haunt the hills— (ah sweet, dare I think, beneath fetter of golden clasp, of the rhythm, the fall and rise of yours, carven, slight beneath straps of gold that keep 192

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their slender beauty caught, like wings and bodies of trapped birds). (CP 122) The movement of the goddess is dramatized and thematized in the “flawless” feet of the poem itself. In “the rhythm, the fall and rise” of these cadences, the goddess seems to “haunt the hills,” as a distant echo of older poetic feet but free to create her own pace. Like a latter-day Keats (whose poem, “On the Sonnet,” imagined feet “fetter’d” and “constrained” in “sandals more interwoven and complete / to fit the naked feet of poesy”), Hippolyus envisions Artemis as the embodiment of poetry, with feet as “slender beauty caught” in “golden clasp” and “straps of gold.” But since this stanza is written in free verse, it is less constrained by the regular measures of nineteenth-century meter (which according to Keats should “weigh the stress / of every chord” and “be misers of sound and syllable, no less / than Midas of his coinage,” in order to turn dull rhymes into pure gold). Instead fleet-footed Artemis seems to fly in irregular measures (fluttering like the wings of trapped birds) to create a new lyric strain, more “sweet” than anything seen or heard before. When Hippolytus “temporizes,” he (or rather H.D.) is measuring out poetry with a different idea of metrical time. Rather than strictly following the principles of English accentual/syllabic verse (counting out sounds and syllables to “weigh the stress of every chord”), the poem strains to reimagine prosody, not quite like nineteenth-century experiments with classical quantitative verse in English, but nevertheless producing a new sense of duration. With lines that speed up and slow down in variable tempo, the pacing of the poem is itself a form of “temporizing” (from the medieval Latin “temporizare,” to pass the time). To mark the passing of time, the poem is divided into three stanzas, each one with a long parenthetical digression, as well as multiple enjambments and dashes at the end of lines, creating temporal prolongation as well as acceleration. The interplay of different temporalities throughout the poem, and thematized in the “feet” of the second stanza, recalls Ezra Pound’s play on metrical feet in his poem, “The Return” (1917): “See, they return; ah, see the tentative / Movements, and the slow feet, / The trouble in the pace and the uncertain / Wavering!” But by projecting this metrical movement onto the figure of Artemis, H.D. turned the “slow feet” of Pound’s poem into feet that would move more swiftly toward the return of “classical” verse in English. This metrical allegory is further dramatized in Hippolytus Temporizes, in a more elaborate diversification of H.D.’s verse. H.D. recalled in a letter that her verse drama began with some metrical experiments: “I had made a few rough Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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notes and jotted down a few metres in 1920” but “I didn’t get the play under way or shaped to my satisfaction till many years later.”53 As H.D. moved in the early 1920s from translating passages of Euripides to rewriting Euripidean tragedy, she published a series of poems about characters from Hippolytus in particular, introducing them as dramatis personae into her own, dramatic revision of the tragedy.54 She envisioned her verse drama in three acts: H.D.’s Artemis refuses Hippolytus and loves only his dead mother Hippolyta, “chaste queen and ally, / valiant and fervid amazon” (28); Hippolytus is then seduced by Phaedra in the guise of Artemis, for one night of erotic ecstasy; both mortals come to a miserable end, while the virginal Artemis remains untouched by this tragedy of eros. The erotic triangulations of the plot have been analyzed by critics, who explore from different perspectives how Hippolytus “temporizes” to prolong his complex desire for Artemis.55 But as with her earlier translations of Euripides, H.D. also plays out the rhythms of desire in metrical form, transforming poetry about eros into a play about the eros of poetry. Hippolytus Temporizes begins and ends with the words of Artemis, who rejects the ardent prayers of Hippolytus, first in the prologue and again in the epilogue: “I heard the intolerable rhythm / and sound of prayer” (8; 136). Throughout the drama she refuses to be embodied in and through the words of Hippolytus, but despite her refusal of his rhythmic invocations (“Again, / again / intolerable prayer,” 9), Hippolytus is hot on her trail: O wild, wild, wild, O sweet, is this the shape and pattern of your feet? (11–12) In a series of single-foot lines that are printed like the trace of her feet on the page (a pattern of versification repeated throughout this verse drama), Hippolytus tries to retrace the “shape and pattern” of Artemis in the musical meters of song: O dear, I have inflamed and torn the dispassionate air with sound of flute and note of song and metre— (12) 194

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The goddess of the hunt is herself hunted down by Hippolytus, who fills the air with “note of song / and metre,” thus interrupting (and perhaps violating with his inflamed passion) the “dispassionate air” of Artemis. His ardent prayer is an attempt to capture her rhythm in song: “song may yet entrap you,” he tells Artemis, as he seeks “the very pulse and passion of your feet” (14). Thus Hippolytus turns the literal and figurative feet of Artemis into the rhythms of his own pulsing desire. Although Artemis resists her embodiment in the prayers of Hippolytus, she replies in the same cadences that he uses to invoke her: Alas, Alas, Alas, I would escape Myself escape from all men’s songs And praying. (17) After declaring that she would rather be a pure spirit of nature, transcending human form and even the shape of a goddess, she tries to ward off Hippolytus by turning his apostrophes into an antiapostrophe (his “O” is her “Alas”). But when she is called upon she must respond in turn. “I must answer those who pray the goddess,” she complains: Have I no peace no quiet anywhere? you trick, you trap, Hippolytus, a goddess in your snare. (18) Against her wishes, she is trapped into addressing Hippolytus in response to his address to her. At this point, the verse drama modulates into dialogue like stichomythia in Greek, but transposed into English cadences where Hippolytus and Artemis respond to each other in rhyme. In the very form of their rhythmic exchange, they are already transformed into rhyming counterparts of each other: Hippolytus. Say rather you have trapped, have stricken me— Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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Artemis. I have not lured you here nor anywhere— Hippolytus. There is a lure more potent than mere prayer— Artemis. What lure, what lure, Hippolytus but beware— Hippolytus. The lure of frenzied feet, of webbed gold hair— Artemis. I am not woman nor of womankind— Hippolytus. To such, O mistress, I am blind, blind, blind— (18–19) The prayers of Hippolytus threaten to turn his lyric meters into a “lure of frenzied feet,” an erotic overture that projects the virgin goddess as his object of desire, notwithstanding her insistence that she is “not woman / nor of womankind.” Hippolytus insists, in turn, that he is “blind, blind, blind” to this vision of Artemis as the projection of his own fantasy. However, his vision dissolves when Artemis disappears into thin air and (according to stage directions that suddenly appear in italics) “the whole of the forest becomes blurred in a curious white mist” that leaves Hippolytus “wandering as if struck blind” (31). When Hyperides enters (a “courtier of Athens,” introduced into the plot by H.D.), he declares that the worship of Artemis is but a “boy infatuation / for a wraith,” and he discovers “the wraith-form of Hippolytus” lost in the forest (31–32). To bring the boy back to the world of men, the manly Hyperides calls for a “band of singing-men” to perform music “patterned on the iambics” of songs from the Greek island of Cos (39–40). But Hippolytus will have none of it, because the song is in the wrong meter: O tear the strings have done with mockery of set and stated time of word and metre; have done with all that tune, throw the lyre down; what word, what word can tell the sudden rhythm of her white feet that even as a bird wing has fled? 196

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The iambic measures of the song are too regular (a “mockery / of set and stated time / of word and metre”) for Hippolytus, who yearns for the cadences that will capture the “sudden rhythm” of Artemis as her feet take flight. Failing to rise to more variable lyric measures, the singing-men might as well “throw the lyre down.” The question posed by Hippolytus (“what word, what word, / can tell the sudden rhythm?”) is key to the allegory of meter that H.D.’s verse drama tries to “tell,” not only in recounting the tragic tale of Hippolytus but in counting out the meters to which he aspires. For most men, iambic verse is merely a “measure to beat out / the tune” in regular feet, as Hyperides insists: What is song then, but measure to beat out the tune for feet to move by? (40) But Hippolytus replies that the flat-footed song of the singing-men cannot rise and fall in a grander cadence, like the tides at sea or the diurnal rhythm of sunrise and sundown: Feet, feet, feet, feet, what of the head, the heart, the frenzy that swims up like sudden tide of full storm-sea at sun-down? (40–41) Instead of stomping “feet, feet, feet, feet” to the “beat” of a tune, Hippolytus tries to reimagine accentual verse in metrical feet that can measure time on a larger scale. What he has in mind is a temporization of meter: unlike Hyperides who claims that “song is a thing, / fitted to time and measure” (41), Hippolytus seeks to transform song from “a thing” into a more expansive spiritual experience both within and beyond time. Driven by this spiritualized passion for Artemis, Hippolytus rides his chariot into the waves of a sea-storm and is flung along the coast, where is found ravaged at the beginning of Act III by Helios (H.D.’s name for Apollo, twin of Artemis). When Helios calls out the name of Artemis to witness the destruction, her name is repeated by the dying Hippolytus again and again, in a recurring refrain: Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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Artemis, Artemis, Artemis, Artemis. (99–105) Speaking in pure dactyls (one foot per line), Hippolytus has left behind iambic verse altogether, now invoking the feet of the goddess as the very embodiment of her name. Artemis reluctantly enters the scene, and upon seeing Hippolytus “shattered / by his broken car” (114), she concludes that he has been destroyed by his own song: “Song, song, song, it is / that shatters all—” (115). But because Hippolytus is dying in the name of Artemis, the goddess takes pity: “Then is all, all forgiven / in song’s name” (116). However, in a longer dialogue between the twin gods, Helios explains to Artemis that the death of Hippolytus is in the name of Eros as a force that rules all, even the gods themselves: “None may affront his name, / not one of us, / ah cruel Eros, / none may dispel the gloom / that his name tells, / all, all must fall, / thou, I and luminous God; / Eros is still man’s tyrant / and god’s king” (118). Here Helios recalls the evocation of Eros performed by the chorus in the original Greek tragedy (the choral ode previously translated by H.D., beginning with “Men you strike / and the gods’ / dauntless spirits alike,” and ending in “reign absolute”). The tyranny of Eros is absolute because what “his name tells” is the universal rhythm of desire that all must follow; even Helios himself has been struck by the cruelty of Eros in his passion for the young boy Hyacinthus (“my heart is stricken / by that flower-name,” 127). For this reason, while Artemis would rather detach the pure spirit of Hippolytus from his body, Helios insists on trying to bring that body back to life. At this turning point in H.D.’s verse drama, in a twist on the Euripidean plot, Helios asserts his own power as the god of healing. Calling out “Paeon,” he recalls Hippolytus to the living: Come, Paeon, Paeon, Power, myself but beyond shape of god or man, come then Myself abstraction, mystic fire, lift up, 198

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lift up, as a sun-ray may lift from a dank marsh, a broken flower. (130) The body of Hippolytus (now a broken flower, like Hyacinthus) is lifted up and revived through this incantation, in which Helios calls upon the “abstraction” of himself in a special kind of song. Paeon is the proper name for a metrical foot of four syllables (one long and three short, in any order) that is often used in the paean (a traditional Greek hymn to Apollo). Going beyond iambs (two syllables) and dactyls (three syllables), the paeon freer verse form that might free Hippolytus from the constraints of his doomed desire for Artemis. According to the stage directions, Hippolytus “stirs” in response to this chant (130), but when he begins to speak, Phaedra’s deception and seduction of Hippolytus is revealed. He is no longer a virginal boy in pursuit of a virgin goddess, as Artemis laments: Paeon, O see, his mind is changed with rapture, this is not the Hippolytus of old. (134) Artemis abandons Hippolytus yet again (“Let him go back to death,” 135), and Helios is forced to admit his failure (“again I fail,” 136). But as Hippolytus dies a second time, it would seem that H.D. at least succeeded in transforming “Hippolytus of old” into a new form of versification, temporizing the meter as if it were classical verse. In The Classical World of H.D., Thomas Burnett Swann dedicated a chapter to Hippolytus Temporizes as a “small masterpiece”: “From her Euripidean materials, clearly H.D. has fashioned an original play—what might be called a lyrical play,” because “the very nature of H.D.’s free verse is lyrical rather than dramatic.” According to Swann, “the short lines, heavily iambic . . . and artfully repetitive . . . drum into the ears like an incantation,” and “her controlled free verse, musical with iambs and scattered with delicately rhymed lyrics, delights both the ear and the heart.”56 But as we have seen, H.D.’s verse drama moves through and beyond iambic meter into a more expansive sense of metrical time, dramatized in the prayers of Hippolytus and personified in Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek

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the gods (the dactyls of Artemis, the paeons of Helios). Phaedra also enacts the rhythms of desire in more varied metrical feet, especially in her impassioned prayer to Aphrodite (in a Swinburnean cadence: “O swallow, / beating with insatiate wing, / the very pulse and center of the air, / O swallow, swallow, / listening everywhere,” 53). And there is the boy from Cyprus who sounds even more like the triple meters of Swinburne, as he sings, “Where is the nightingale . . . where is the bird of fire?” (59–60). To Phaedra this boy seems like the very personification of Eros (“The very song / the boy has sung to us—/ is he not Eros?” she asks, 65), and his song of eternal desire is repeated by the ghostly chorus of maidens (71), and finally even echoed by Hippolytus himself in his dying words (133–134). The spiritual transfiguration of Hippolyus, transported into the song of pure eros, is a metrical transformation: a form of being beyond “iamb.” In this respect, Hippolytus recalls Hipparchia, from a story written by H.D. at the time when she was also composing Hippolytus Temporizes.57 In this historical fiction, a Roman girl (the “hypersensitive” Hipparchia, 43) is haunted by the rhythms of Greek poetry, which she feels in her body (“The metre beat and beat rhythmic and undeniable hypnotic refrain in her tired body,” 34) and everywhere around her (“outside a singular subtle recurring rhythm beat singular and hypnotizing antistrophe to the eternal rhythm in her brain,” 35). She discovers this eternal rhythm most of all in reading the choral meters of Euripides, where the boundary between internal and external rhythms starts to blur: Euripidean choros seemed to fit simply her surroundings, part simply of the landscape as that gentle, subtle lap-lap of the almost tideless ocean that beat a measure so fine, so subtle, so etherialized that one could scarcely count it. Euripidean choros was perfected subtle breath of metre. (38) The metrical movement of Euripidean choruses seems to change her sense of time, no longer counted out in regular iambs but in more measures more variable and more refined. As Hipparchia sits down to translate Greek into Latin, “transposing” Greek words of “long dead poems that could yet remake a universe” (72–73), she discovers a new world of verse: “The old stately meters hammered in her skull. Her feet quickened out of proportion to its measured beating. Metres formed and reformed in her head. Past and present formed and reformed” (76). More than an exercise in versification, this imaginative transformation of Greek meter marks another way of being in, and out of, time 200

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not only for Hipparchia and Hippolytus, but also for H.D. herself. As we have seen, her “free” versions of Euripidean tragedy superimpose an idea of classical quantitative meter on English accentual verse, so that her feet also “quickened out of proportion to its measured beating.” In H.D.’s Euripides, past and present are formed and re-formed to make ancient Greek look like modern free verse, and vice versa.

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Dancing Greek Letters The letter is revealed in its transformability, its volatility. —Patricia Yaeger, Honey-Mad Women (1988)

Modern Maenads Following on the heels of poets like A. Mary F. Robinson, who translated Euripidean choruses into metrical feet of “Choriambs & Iambs,” and H. D., who tracked the rhythms of “feet, feet, feet, feet” running through her poetic imitations of Euripides, the women I consider in the present chapter enact an increasingly kinetic relation to ancient Greek: they tried to make Greek letters dance, figuratively and literally. Through dancing letters—understood as simultaneous subject and object of rhythmic movement—women mobilized Ladies’ Greek in new directions at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond, toward an experience of kinesthesia. They found in the Greek tragic chorus a model for the choreographic integration of poetry, music, and dance as rhythmic arts, and in particular they turned to The Bacchae of Euripides to incorporate rhythm into a moving body, both individual and collective. This Euripidean tragedy, with its chorus of Bacchantes or maenads, dramatizes women transported, ecstatically, by the rhythms of song and dance. The figure of the maenad will move throughout my chapter, in and out of different examples, to demonstrate how the identification of modern women with Greek maenads took various forms: in poetry and prose, in visual arts and dance, in scholarship and pedagogy, in college rituals and theatrical performance, all enacting the increasing mobility of “the new woman” in the early twentieth century. Thus the maenad, already a figure for transport, moved freely around the transatlantic culture of Ladies’ Greek as the embodiment of women’s movements, in every sense. Translating Greek tragedy is a rite of passage for the fictional heroine of Mary Olivier: A Life, published by May Sinclair in 1919. At the beginning of a new century, as Mary Olivier reaches her middle years, she discovers a new idea of rhythm in The Bacchae: 202

Eighteen ninety-eight. Eighteen ninety-nine. Nineteen hundred. Thirty-five—thirty-six—thirty-seven. Three years. Her mind kept on stretching; it held three years in one span like one year. The large rhythm of time appeased and exalted her. In the long summers while Mamma worked in the garden she translated Euripides. The Bacchae. You could do it after you had read Walt Whitman. If you gave up the superstition of singing; the little tunes of rhyme. If you left off that eternal jingling and listened, you could hear what it ought to be. Something between talking and singing. If you wrote verse that could be chanted: that could be whispered, shouted, screamed as they moved. Agave and her Maenads. Verse that would go with a throbbing beat, excited, exciting; beyond rhyme. That would be nearest to the Greek verse. (325–326) Mary imagines rhythms for the future of English poetry by looking back to the choral measures of Greek tragedy, and especially the rhythmic incantations of “Agave and her Maenads.” Their maenadic performance, coordinating movements of the body with verse that can be chanted “as they moved,” exemplifies a kinesthetic experience of rhythm: not “the little tunes of rhyme” associated with Victorian prosody, but rather “verse that would go with a throbbing beat.” Moving to the “excited, exciting” rhythm of the beat, the maenads embody a poetry that feels both ancient and modern, going “beyond rhyme” toward free verse. Mary’s excitement about her discovery, or recovery, of this primal rhythm is shared by Richard Nicholson, a scholar of Euripidean tragedy who (“making himself more and more excited”) exclaims enthusiastically that her poetry confirms his philology: “That translation of The Bacchae—what made you think of doing it like that? .  .  .  Yes, Yes. It is the way to do it. The only way. . . . You, see, that’s what my Euripides book’s about” (338). With Richard’s encouragement and endorsement of her Euripides translations, Mary is initiated into the literary world as a poet for the twentieth century. Sinclair’s poetic novel is a “novel poem” in the tradition of Aurora Leigh, transforming E.B.B.’s blank verse into pointillistic rhythmic prose to create a modern portrait of the artist as a young woman. But as Suzanne Raitt observes in May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian, “if the form of Mary Olivier is typically modernist, the events and characters it describes are mostly Victorian.”1 Its stream-of-consciousness narrative draws on the conventions of Ladies’ Greek to narrate the literary development of a woman of letters: “a life” not unlike Aurora, formed early on by desire for Greek. Mary remembers the sound of her brother reciting lines from Homer during her childhood, and in adolescence Dancing Greek Letters

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these rhythms resound in her memory “still,” in both senses: “She wished she knew Greek; the patterns the sounds made were so hard and still (Sinclair 125). Inspired by a language that resonates in the silence of her own imagination, Mary yearns and gradually learns to read the classical texts that her brother has left behind on his bedroom shelf, including three volumes of Euripides.2 This is not only the story of Mary but of May Sinclair, who taught herself ancient Greek from her brother’s books; after studying classical languages and philosophy at Cheltenham College for a year (1881–1882), she pursued a literary career with close connections to Ezra Pound and his circle, including H.D. and her husband Richard Aldington (possibly a model for Richard Nicholson). Sinclair shared with the Aldingtons a passion for Greek tragedy—in her will she bequeathed her Greek editions of Aeschylus to Richard, and of Euripides to H.D.—and she understood that their Greek translations were important poetic productions in their own right. In narrating “a life” in the third person, Sinclair must have had H.D. in mind as well, another woman of Greek letters. Mary Olivier is like H.D.’s HERmione, an experimental autobiography that is also written rhythmic prose and (as we saw in Chapter Four) haunted by an idea of Greek rhythm.3 Sinclair admired the rhythmic invention of H.D, whom she considered the most significant of the Imagist poets. In two influential “Notes” for The Egoist (1915) on H.D. and Imagism, Sinclair observed: “The poetry of H.D. proves the power of the clean, naked, sensuous image to carry the emotion without rhyme—not, I think, without rhythm; the best Imagist poems have a very subtle and beautiful rhythm.”4 This review resonates with Sinclair’s rhapsodic description of Mary Olivier translating the incantation of maenads, linking motion and emotion in free verse that would also “carry the emotion without rhyme.” Sinclair went on to write in further detail about H.D.’s translations of Greek tragedy, including Euripidean choruses in Hymen (1921), and she was aware of H.D. working on “Chorus Translations from The Bacchae” published later in Red Roses for Bronze (1931). An ardent advocate for vers libre, Sinclair saw in H.D.’s translation of these choral odes an opportunity to liberate English verse into new rhythmic forms and new forms of rhythmicized experience. The mobility of free verse is most dramatically enacted by the chorus as they rush on stage in the parodos of The Bacchae. In H.D.’s translation of this entry song, the Bacchantes calls upon the city of Thebes to join their singing, dancing throng: Crown yourself with oak leaf and dance, 204

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dance, dance ecstatic; bind white wool to the deer pelt, lift high the sacred narthex, And dance until the earth dance. (224) Simultaneously describing and performing their actions, the chorus takes on the role of maenads, female followers of Dionysus who band together in a sacred group (thiasos) for ritual worship. Crowned in leaves, dressed in fawn skin, and brandishing a thyrsus (a fennel rod or narthex twined with ivy), they are transformed into mad women (mainades) moving toward ekstasis: literally “standing outside” oneself, going beyond boundaries of the self to become part of a larger collective experience, to “dance, / dance, / dance ecstatic  .  .  . and dance until the earth dance.” H.D’s repetition of “dance” creates a rhythm that is repeated again a few lines later, in the description of Bacchantes “driven mad, / mad, / mad / by Bacchus.” As the parodos proceeds, these rhythms accelerate, culminating in a unified experience of music and song and dance, inspired by the god and embodied in their own choral performance: Bacchantes, beat deep drum-note, with Phrygian chant, Sing Evius, with sacred flute and sweet note, incite, incite our wild dance from hill to distant hill-peak; so hearing him, Bacchantes, leap out and as the wild-colt at meadow, round its mare’s feet, they beat ecstatic dance-beat. (226) Dancing Greek Letters

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In Greek these final lines of the parodos are “metrically difficult” according to Dodds, who notes that “glyconic rhythms lead over to the final breathless gallop of paeons (—v v v) and dactyls in which the rush of the maenads is described” (73). But in English this metrical analysis is transformed into the rhythms of beat prosody, with “beat” doubling as verb and noun, as the Bacchantes “beat deep drum-note” and “beat ecstatic dance-beat.” The parodos is a self-reflexive performative utterance, introducing the Bacchantes as a chorus beating and dancing its own rhythm. This idea of rhythm, the “throbbing beat” described by May Sinclair in prose and performed in poetry by H.D., reflects a broad discourse about rhythm not only in modernist poetics but in the modern science of “Rhythmics” and the “eurhythmic” training of the body in modern dance. The rhythmicized figure of the maenad was literalized and embodied by women, perhaps most famously in the dancing of Isadora Duncan who traveled to Athens in 1903 to dance like a maenad in the Theater of Dionysus. In photographs taken by her brother Raymond Duncan she performed what she called “the Bacchic shiver,” transforming the repertoire of static poses, gestures, and attitudes associated with nineteenth-century Delsartism into a dynamic choreography. And in 1908 Maud Allen was called a “reeling Bacchante” in her performances of “ecstatic dancing,” part of a larger movement that Fiona Macintosh traces in “Dancing Maenads in Early 20th-Century Britain.” These modern maenads embodied a new kinesthetic emerging in the twentieth century, presenting their bodies in motion as if Greek letters were literally dancing off the page.5 But like all modern movements, maenadism had its Victorian precursors. In the course of the nineteenth century, The Bacchae accumulated commentary from classical scholars, anthropologists, and literary critics, not only because of Nietzsche’s influential reading of Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy but also as a primary source for speculation about maenadic cults—a question that did not concern Nietzsche much, but proved central to the reception of The Bacchae among women. Earlier in the century, the maenad had appealed to the popular imagination as a figure for female identification and feminine performance, as Lady Emma Hamilton and others were already posing as Bacchic dancers in theatrical settings and in the visual arts.6 And this fascination with Greek maenads continued in Victorian paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema: in “Autumn: A Vintage Festival” (1873), for example, he imagines the Dionysiac abandon of a maenad crowned in ivy and draped with fawnskin over one shoulder, eyes half-closed in ecstasy, brandishing a torch that kindles her fiery passion. Poised on one foot with the other knee lifted, she is in suspended motion, momentarily framed within the painting but also represented as if she is about to 206

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move beyond its frame: a mobile figure, and a figure for mobility that cannot be contained. Her pose recalls Greek maenads represented on vases in antiquity, leaping high with their heads thrown back, or rushing forward, thyrsos in hand. Alma-Tadema made other paintings as well, depicting more maenads in motion, sprawled on the floor, dancing madly, or playing musical instruments, all prompting Ruskin to condemn the “Bacchanalian phrenzy, which M. Alma Tadema seems to hold it his heavenly mission to pourtray [sic].”7 Much of this Bacchanalian “phrenzy” was fantasy, of course, projecting Victorian ideas and debates about “The Woman Question” onto ancient Greece. While maenadism had been associated with political anarchy after the French Revolution, increasingly maenads served as metaphors for the revolutionary gender politics of first-wave feminism and, by the end of the century, sexual anarchy.8 Greek maenads were invoked in discourses about the New Woman in fin-de-siècle England, where conservatives like Eliza Lynn Linton fulminated against the social insurgency of “the wild women.”9 The redefinition of sex and gender roles in America also provoked anxiety about the disorderly conduct of the New Woman, turning the metaphor of the maenad into one of the “metaphoric languages that translated this flesh-and-blood creature into a condensed symbol of disorder and rebellion.”10 But while some were denouncing maenadism, others pronounced it the spirit of a new age. When Walter Pater published “The Bacchanals of Euripides” for readers of Macmillan Magazine in 1889, he imagined Greek maenads as the embodiment of “some new and rapturous spirit” inspired by a “new, strange, romantic god”: Coleridge, in one of his fantastic speculations, refining on the German word for enthusiasm—Schwärmerei, swarming, as he says, “like the swarming of bees together”—has explained how the sympathies of mere numbers, as such, the random catching on fire of one here and another there, when people are collected together, generates as if by mere contact, some new and rapturous spirit, not traceable in the individual units of a multitude. Such swarming was the essence of that strange dance of the Bacchic women: literally like winged things, they follow, with motives, we may suppose, never quite made clear even to themselves, their new, strange, romantic god. Himself a woman-like god,—it was on women and feminine souls that his power mainly fell.11 Pater enthusiastically embraced the contagious enthusiasm generated “as if by mere contact” through “that strange dance of the Bacchic women.” Indeed, Dancing Greek Letters

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in following the twists and turns of Dionysiac dancing in his prose rhythms, Pater’s rapturous description of Greek maenads made him sound like another worshipper of Dionysus, a “woman-like god” who likes “women and feminine souls” not unlike Pater himself. As the essay went on to explain how the Dionysian “Thiasus” was “almost exclusively formed of women—of those who experience most directly the influence of things which touch thought through the senses” (54), Pater projected himself in their midst: as an aesthete, he too aspired to “touch thought” through sensory experience. In Pater’s account, maenads experience primal sensation before its development and differentiation into the subjective perception of the modern (male) aesthete. Instead of locating this experience within an individual body, maenadism is the collective embodiment of sensations that are “not traceable in the individual units of a multitude,” but experienced when bodies are “collected together” to worship Dionysus. Pater’s feminized and potentially feminist vision of Dionysian aestheticism made Pater an influential figure (if not quite a father, more like a queer uncle) for fin-de-siècle female aesthetes.12 Paraphrasing the poetry of Euripides in his own poetic prose, Pater transformed maenadism into an aesthetic ideal that appealed not only to modernist poets like H.D. but also to her fin-de-siècle precursos, like Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. During her brief studies at Newnham College, Bradley had been “an enthusiastic student of the Bacchae,” and despite a seemingly domesticated life together as aunt and niece (dedicated to each other and to poetry), Bradley and Cooper kept a shrine to Dionysus in the garden. “Wouldn’t one give much to surprise the Bacchant in Walter Pater!” they exclaimed after one of their visits to him,13 and on occasion they also surprised their own visitors by revealing themselves to be “the Bacchic Maenads, they really were.”14 Their first literary collaboration under the name of “Michael Field” was Callirrhoë (1884), a verse drama about the conversion of Calydonian maidens into dancing maenads, “caught up by the great choric throng” (13). According to the preaching of Coresus, a Bacchic priest who urges Callirrhoë to “set / Your limbs free to the rhythm of your soul” (21), the primal rhythms of this dancing throng—what Pater calls “that strange dance”—create an ecstatic experience, highly aestheticized and eroticized, that is the origin of all artistic inspiration: “All art is ecstasy / All literature expression of intense / Enthusiasm, be beside yourself!” (22–23). Callirrhoë is converted to this artistic credo by sacrificing herself to Coresus: “I am come / Humbly to supplicate I may receive / Initiation in the Bacchic rites, / And die his Maenad” (58).15 Callirrhoë can be read as Michael Field’s initiation into the cult of Pater: in the preface to their drama, Bradley and Cooper followed him in emphasizing that “the myth of Dionysus is 208

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the glorification of enthusiasm,” but they also went beyond Pater in imagining their own version of the myth from the maenad’s perspective. Their enthusiasm was contagious, as we read in an enthusiastic review of Callirrhoë by A. Mary F. Robinson, another female aesthete: “today, the cult of Dionysus is new-born,” she wrote, announcing a new era for modern maenads.16

Jane Harrison’s Thrill Not only poets and dancers but scholars also followed Dionysus with Bacchic feet. A decade before Isadora Duncan danced the “Bacchic shiver” in the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, Jane Harrison had already traveled to the same place to write a commentary for The Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens (1890). There Harrison imagined a Dionysian dance in the theater of her mind, and she then went on to re-imagine it in her vivid scholarly prose. She wrote that the archaeological site of the theater was but a prompt for the scholarly imagination, and insisted that “the first business of the mythologist is to think away all that is before his eyes”: All this must go; the splendid array of seats, which are to the modern mind the theatre, must go; not only the stage of Phaedrus, but every scrap of stone stage building, must also go. This is not only for the mythologist who seeks to imagine the early Dionysiac dance, but even, as he will learn to his amazement, for the classical scholar who wants to summon back the memory of a play of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Euripides. And what is left? What can be seen of the theatre of Aeschylus that has any mythological meaning and intent?17 Harrison answered the question by looking back further in time to the origins of Greek tragedy in archaic ritual, and especially in dancing: “The theater of the Greeks was originally an orchestra, or dancing-place, that and nothing more, yet enough for Dionysus the Dance-lover—an altar and a level place about it, circular because the worshippers danced around in a ring” (286). Stripping the theater down to a “central dancing-place,” she emphasized that Greek tragedy was performed first and foremost for “Dionysus the Dance-lover.” But although the god was at the center of it all, she also envisioned a primary role for maenads as his worshippers, as the space they created dancing “around in a ring,” later known as the orchestra, was the beginning of Greek theater. Always eager to visualize what she imagined, Harrison turned to vase paintings for “some pictures of this early circular dance,” in particular a cylix from Dancing Greek Letters

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5.1 “Dance of Maenads (Berlin Museum).” Illustration from Mythology & Monuments of Ancient Athens, trans. Margaret Verrall with commentary by Jane Harrison (London: Macmillan, 1890), 287.

the Berlin Museum to which Harrison gave the title, “Dance of Maenads” (figure 5.1). In this illustration Dionysus is surrounded by eleven maenads, who are depicted with ritual objects and musical instruments in a series of dance poses rhythmically described by Harrison: “Almost circling round the altar is the ring of Maenads, broken in part into groups of two, dancing their simple contre-danse, with lively gestures of hands uplifted to salute the god, and bodies bent to invoke the mother earth” (287). Indeed the “lively gestures” in this illustration, leading the eye forward and backward to create a sense of perpetual motion, make the maenads appear more alive and more dynamic than Dionysus himself: the individual figure of the god is static, while they dance circles around him in a collective ritual. Moreover, in Harrison’s description, they are not only saluting the god but also invoking the mother earth, thus grounding tragedy in female worship at its very origins. Her vision of maenadism gave women a central role to play in the birth of tragedy, not only out of the spirit of music but out of the spirit of dance. If Harrison had begun reading Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy at this point in her scholarly career, she was already developing her own ideas about Greek tragedy born from the dancing bodies of women. Closer to home, Pater’s essays on Dionysos and The Bacchae were a more immediate influence on Harrison. She had visited Pater once, and found him to be a “soft, kind cat” who “purred so persuasively that I lost the sense of what he was saying.”18 Yet she recaptured the sense of what he was saying in another 210

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sense, as she recognized in his writing a desire for sensation that also inspired her own writing. Harrison had been an aesthete in her early years at Newnham (as recalled by another student “in the days of the aesthetic craze . . . with brown hair in a Greek coil at the back),19 and she embraced aestheticism during her years as an independent scholar in London, where she gave public lectures on Greek art to both popular and scholarly audiences, and published essays in the Magazine of Art.20 When Harrison published Introductory Studies in Greek Art in 1885, she began her book along the lines of Pater, by asserting that “an impression of the senses” (v) is derived from the contemplation of Greek art, and by presenting her own impressions in written form, so that readers “may nurture their soul on the fair sights and pure visions of Ideal art” (vii). Much as Pater’s Hellenism was shaped by the convergence of art historical, literary, and anthropological discourses in England toward the end of the nineteenth century, so also Harrison increasingly turned to the conceptual models and techniques of other disciplines to write about myth and ritual in Greek religion. Although her theories were often disputed, and later fell into disrepute, Harrison has been the subject of renewed interest among critics, re-evaluating her place within the history of classical scholarship and nineteenth-century comparative religion, and how she in turn influenced twentieth-century theories of ritual and myth.21 However, her work merits re-reading within the context of British aestheticism as well, as Harrison’s transition from her earlier studies of art into her later studies of religion was a logical development of these aesthetic principles.22 Harrison’s sense of style—in her classical scholarship, and in her life as a classical scholar—can be understood as a reworking of Pater’s late-Victorian legacy from a feminine and increasingly feminist perspective. While the Newnham scholar within her close circle of friends at Cambridge and the Brasenose scholar in his solitary study at Oxford inhabited different institutions, both developed a scholarly aesthetic in writing about ancient Greece for contemporary readers (“imaginative prose, it may be thought, being the special art of the modern world,” as Pater wrote in his essay on style).23 Following Pater, Harrison came to understand Dionysiac ritual as a primal aesthetic impulse at the origin of all religious experience. While she claimed “there are some to whom by natural temperament the religion of Bromios, son of Semele, is and must always be a dead letter,” she counted herself (like Pater) among those intoxicated by the living spirit of Dionysus: Those to whom wine brings no inspiration, no moments of sudden illumination, of wider and deeper insight, of larger human clarity and Dancing Greek Letters

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understanding, find it hard to realize what to others of other temperament is so natural, so elemental, so beautiful—the constant shift from physical to spiritual that is of the essence of the religion of Dionysos. But there are those also, and they are saintly souls, who know it all to the full, know the exhilaration of the wine, know what it is to be drunken with the physical beauty of a flower or a sunset, with the sensuous imagery of words, with the strong wine of a new idea, with the magic of another’s personality.24 For Harrison the “constant shift from physical to spiritual” was a metaphorical movement at the heart of Dionysiac aestheticism that she sought to mobilize, not only in her account of Dionysos as a god of continual transformation but in the movement of her own Paterian prose in a series of self-transforming figures. “Drunken . . . with the sensuous imagery of words, with the strong wine of a new idea,” Harrison performed a Dionysiac intoxication in writing that reveled in the metaphorical expression of ideas, moving rapidly like the dance of maenads around the central figure of Dionysus. An early version of Harrison’s imaginative identification with maenads can be glimpsed in her brief review in 1894 of Psyche by Erwin Rohde, a German scholar whose book about the immortality of the Greek soul was quickly subsumed into Harrison’s own discussion of recent British scholarship on The Bacchae. She began the review by invoking the Cambridge classicist A. W. Verrall (married to Harrison’s fellow student at Newnham, Margaret Verrall) for his account of “the problem of The Bacchae,” but behind Verrall stood Pater’s “Study of Dionysus.” Harrison moved back from the “rational” Greeks to the “irrationality” of their early religions, and like Pater, she was fascinated with Dionysus Zagreus in particular, the god who was “torn to pieces” and worshipped through ekstasis and askesis: “What a madness it must have seemed!” she wrote with enthusiasm, “To dance till we are dizzy, to toss our heads in ecstasy.”25 Although she acknowledged this dizzy dancing “may not seem to us the best means of promoting spirituality,” nevertheless she insisted that the true spirit of Dionysus was experienced through the senses. The sensuous immediacy of this experience may defy the “common sense” of “the thoroughly British Pentheus,” according to Harrison, but the women who follow Dionysus have greater access to the truth, even though it is dubbed “dangerous, disreputable, immoral, a peril to hearth and home.” A few years later, when Harrison was invited to return to Newnham College as her scholarly hearth and home in 1898, and as she was delving deeper into her study of archaic cults and rituals, she liked to imagine herself as one of those 212

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uncanny women who followed Dionysos, if not actually “dangerous” then at least “disreputable” among thoroughly British scholars because her methods of research were unorthodox. Bertrand Russell offered (in jest) a bull to Harrison, “on condition she and some of her women friends would guarantee to tear it to pieces,”26 and she was attacked (less in jest) by Percy Gardner for preferring “savage disorders, Dionysiac orgies, the tearing of wild bulls to the ordered and stately ceremonial of Panathenaic processions.”27 Her classical scholarship incorporated a tradition of aesthetic writing exemplified by Pater, who famously asked, “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it produce on me?”28 In her reading of The Bacchae she looked more for sensation than common sense, and like Pater, she sought to recreate this effect in her writing. Alongside Pater and even closer to home, Gilbert Murray was another primary influence on Harrison’s scholarly aesthetics. Combining the work of poetry and philology, Murray was preparing an edition of The Bacchae and working on The Bacchae of Euripides: Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes during the years when she was writing Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903). In their personal correspondence, they exchanged extensive notes and comments on translating Euripides, and after reading his entire Bacchae translation (on the train) Harrison confessed, “the reason why yr verses give me such intense & almost immeasurable delight is that they are just what I wld have given my soul to do myself. As a quite young girl I had a dream of being first a poet & next a scholar & tho both dreams faded swiftly & completely they have always left a sort of empty ache of something never found.”29 But what Harrison did find was the poetry of classical scholarship, which she valued most of all as the revelation of beautiful language and ideas. With Murray as one of her primary collaborators at Cambridge, she discovered how his poetic translations of The Bacchae could make her scholarly argument more poetic as well, as she wrote in her introduction to the first edition of Prolegomena: “It is to Mr. Murray’s translation of The Bacchae that finally, as regards the religion of Dionysos, I owe most. The beauty of that translation, which he kindly allowed me to use before its publication, turned the arduous task of investigation into a labour of delight” (xv). Harrison’s prose was interlaced with quotations from Murray’s poetry, such as his translation of the third choral ode to describe the advent of Dionysos with his maenads (372): Blessed land of Pierie, Dionysus loveth thee, He will come to thee with dancing, Dancing Greek Letters

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Come with joy and mystery, With the Maenads at this hest Winding, winding to the west. Harrison quoted this passage to argue that Dionysos came from Thrace, a theory she later revised, but in following his movement from the east, she was equally interested in following the dancing motion of his maenads, “winding, winding to the west,” as if they might bring the cult of Dionysos farther westward, from ancient Greece to modern England as well. What distinguished Harrison’s ongoing study of Dionysian religion from Pater’s work was the research she pursued in collaboration with Murray, about the historical existence and significance of maenads. In Prolegomena she emphasized they were not mythical figures but actual women, named “maenads” to represent “a state of mind and body . . . almost like a cultus-epithet.” (388). “Maenad means of course simply ‘mad woman,’” she wrote, “and the Maenads are the women-worshippers of Dionysus of whatever race, possessed, maddened or, as the ancients would say, inspired by his spirit.” Such women had other names as well, according to Harrison: “The titles may be Englished as Mad One, Rushing One, Inspired One, Raging One” (389). While recognizing maenadism in Greek myth (“it is not denied for a moment that the Maenads became mythical”) she discerned “the reality of the Maenads” in their epithets: “Mad One, Distraught One, Pure One are simply ways of describing a woman under the influence of god, of Dionysos” (396). Harrison translated these epithets to define maenadism as a kinaesthetic experience, and she quoted a passage from Plutarch to describe the mobility of maenads who carried out these rites of possession and ecstasy in very barbarous fashion and introduced huge tame serpents into the Bacchic assemblies, and these kept creeping out of the ivy and the mystic likna and twining themselves round the thyrsoi of the women and their garlands and frightening the men out of their senses. (398) With a wry comment that men were “clearly too frightened to put a stop to them,” Harrison described maenadism as the movement of women “in Bacchic assemblies” that could not be stopped: “Possessed, magical, and dangerous to handle,” they were not figments of the imagination, but figured on vases in “scenes such as those described by Plutarch as actually taking place.” To illustrate a maenad in motion, Harrison included a striking figure drawn from a cylix at Munich (figure 5.2). This maenad has all the trappings of 214

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5.2 “Maenad.” Illustration from Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 398.

Dionysos: a serpent around her head and fawnskin draped around the shoulders, a thyrsos in one hand, and in the other hand a wild leopard as hunting trophy (somewhat larger than the “soft, kind cat” Harrison associated with Pater: we might imagine the illustration as a portrait of Harrison herself, brandishing him as her trophy). She called it “a beautiful raging maenad,” leaping into action with feet rushing forward and head turning backward, moving in two directions at once, extending her arms and bending her knees, perhaps preparing for a Bacchic shiver. A decade later, Harrison went several steps further in her theories about maenadic cult in Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, published in 1912 along with “An excursus On The Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy” by Gilbert Murray. In her preface to the second edition, Harrison proclaimed herself a “disciple” of Nietzsche, but her account of the origins of Dionysiac worship departed from his. While maenadism was of little interest to Nietzsche—Henry Staten notes how curious is “the almost complete absence of maenads from The Birth of Tragedy, given that the cult of Dionysus was so predominantly identified with female worshippers”30—the performance of song and dance by maenads became central to Harrison’s conception of ritual as a dromenon. Defining dromenon as an action that is “not merely a thing done, but a thing re-done, or pre-done with magical intent,” Harrison emphasized it was “a thing which, like the drama, is collectively performed”; its “basis or kernel is a Dancing Greek Letters

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thiasos or choros,” demonstrating how “religious representation arises from collective action and emotion.”31 In their performance of ritual, linking motion and emotion, maenads represented and indeed embodied the god they worshipped, as Harrison went on to argue: “Dionysos is but his thiasos incarnate” (38). In a striking development of her argument, moving toward a feminist reading, she claimed that the god was born out of female ritual. “The figure of Dionysus, his thiasos, and his relation to his mother and the Maenads, is only to be understood by reference to an earlier social structure that is known as matrilinear” (xxii), she wrote, and in a section entitled “The Maenads as Mothers,” she turned to The Bacchae of Euripides for evidence of that origin: Dionysos, the Bacchos, has a thiasos of Bacchae. But how can a thiasos of women project a young male god? They cannot and do not. Who then do they worship, what divine figure is their utterance? They tell us themselves, they shout it at us in a splendid ritual song (38). Referring to the first chorus of The Bacchae (again in Murray’s English translation) Harrison emphasized their invocation of mythical maternal figures: The timbrel, the timbrel was another’s And back to mother Rhea must it wend, And to our holy singing from the Mother’s, The mad Satyrs carried it to blend In the dancing and the cheer Of our third and perfect Year, And it serves Dionysos in the end. (39) The music of the timbrel may serve “Dionysos in the end,” but it began in archaic rituals enacted by women for mother Rhea and Semele, in the “holy singing” and the “dancing and the cheer” now addressed by the Bacchantes to Bacchos. Indeed, it is through this primal song that he is called into being, according to Harrison. “As Bacchus he is but the incarnate cry of his thiasos, Iacchos,” she concluded, adding an etymology in a footnote to explain how the name of Bacchos is derived from the incantation, “Iacchos” (48). The god is the projection of this cry, a performative utterance that is the dromenon of maenadic ritual and dramatized by the chorus of The Bacchae. Thus maenadism mobilized Harrison’s scholarly imagination in dynamic and diverse ways, from visualizing maenads dancing in the theater of Dionysos and identifying (with) the kinesthetic experience of Dionysian worship, to 216

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reconstructing the historical role of maenads in Dionysiac cult and reinterpreting the chorus of the Bacchae (with reference to Murray’s translations), with increasing emphasis on the power of maenads to project the figure of Dionysos. In Alpha and Omega Harrison looked back on her lifelong pursuit of this figure: I have often wondered why the Olympians, Apollo, Athena, and even Zeus, always vaguely irritated me and why the mystery gods, their shapes and ritual, Demeter, Dionysos, the cosmic Eros, drew and drew me. I see it now. It is just that those mystery gods represent the supreme golden moment achieved by the Greek, and the Greek only, in his incomparable way. The mystery gods are eikonic, caught in lovely human shapes—but they are life-spirits barely held. Dionysos is a human youth, lovely, with curled hair, but in a moment he is a Wild Bull and a Burning Flame. The beauty and the thrill of it! (204–205) Like the powerful projection of Dionysos by his maenads, Harrison also seems to call him into being in the rhythmic cadences of her prose: she explains how mystery gods like Dionysus “drew and drew me,” leading up to her invocation of the god as “Wild Bull” and “Burning Flame,” and re-enacting “the beauty and the thrill” of this experience in an ecstatic exclamation. For Harrison this thrill was an initiation into aesthetic experience that she cultivated not only in her scholarship but in her pedagogy as well. One of her Newnham students wrote that Harrison “stood for all true magic and mystery of the unknown” and had taught “the thrill and passion of intellectual things— the thrill that could be even stronger and more constraining than being in love!”32 Harrison’s teaching style was unorthodox, as she experimented with introducing students to ancient Greek by a “direct method” of immersion: first she would read out loud an excerpt from Greek tragedy and use Murray’s translation to explain the grammatical structure, and then she would ask the student to learn the passage by heart and recite the meter by ear, “expecting that the language would come with a rush from the sheer driving force of the subject matter.”33 In some cases it worked, in other cases not, but because of Harrison’s passionate reading of Greek, she managed to make it a thrilling experience. Even more thrilling were her lectures, dramatically presented to create a sensation. According to Francis Cornford, “every lecture was a drama in which the spectators were to share in the emotions of ‘recognition’ at the moment of epiphany.”34 Appealing to all the senses, she lectured with lantern slides, projecting images that must have included at least some of the maenads illustrated in her books, and with various sound effects. At the end of one lecture, Harrison Dancing Greek Letters

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suddenly raised her voice for recitation as a maenad: “throwing back her head, she burst into a chorus of Euripides in Greek.”35 At the end of another lecture, one of her students remembered “the time when an unearthly noise filled the room,” which turned out to be a young man “demonstrating, according to Miss Harrison’s instructions, what was meant by a bull-roarer,” a sacred instrument used in the Dionysian mysteries.36 And in 1902 Harrison presented a lecture in the Cambridge Archaeological Museum, with a subtitle announcing the mysteries of maenadic ritual: “Many bear the wand, but the Bacchants are few.”37 In her highly performative style of lecturing, Harrison herself seemed to become an inspired maenad initiating her audience into Dionysiac worship: at Cambridge, the cult of Dionysos had become the cult of Harrison, revolving around her dramatic performance of Ladies’ Greek as a scholarly and pedagogical aesthetic.

Bryn Mawr College Rituals While the cult of Harrison at Newnham College was embodied in a charismatic individual who aspired to the enthusiasm—perhaps even the “ecstasy”—of a modern maenad, maenadism also became a popular trope for the collective experience of students at other women’s colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. In “Awakening of the Bacchae,” published in Oxford Poetry (1915), a young Naomi Mitchison celebrated collegiate life as an initiation into new rhythms of thought and feeling: “We felt new life at every pulse-beat cry.” Heady and drunk with knowledge, this collective “we” leaps into action: So it was nowise strange to see, When we leapt up, the dappled skin, The thyrsus twining wondrously, The wine we steeped our faces in. We felt the Bulls’ breath burning on our brows, The branding god-mark that will leave us never, Strong in the wisdom which that touch endows; We were asleep, but now we are awake for ever.38 Touched by the god, these modern maenads demonstrate the persistence of Dionysian aestheticism (as defined by Pater, touching thought through the senses) while moving forward into the future, propelling the movement for women’s higher education into the twentieth century, within and beyond Victorian Oxford and Cambridge, in women’s colleges around England and America. 218

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Of course, each college had its own institutional history and local culture, where the politics of Ladies’ Greek played out with different implications. Under the leadership of its first woman president, Bryn Mawr College also became known for its cultivation of Ladies’ Greek, or what we might call the cult of M. Carey Thomas. Thomas was of the same generation as Jane Harrison, influenced by the aesthetics of Victorian Hellenism and educated in classical and modern philology. Harrison’s performative pedagogy took a different form, however, in the academic career of Thomas, who also began as a woman of Greek letters but transformed this experience into a pedagogical vision of a women’s college that she helped to build, starting as dean in 1885 and then continuing as president for nearly three decades (1894–1922). In lectures such as “The College Women of the Present and Future” (1901), Thomas advocated for the higher education of women in America, and she became an iconic figure fictionalized as “Helen Thornton” in Gertrude Stein’s short story “ (1904): as the dean of Fernhurst College, Miss Thornton “found her exaltation in Swinburne and Walter Pater and with pamphlets and a college worked for the rights of women” (15–16), although (Stein adds snidely) “she took only a small share in the actual instruction of the students for she was no scholar” (18). Unlike Harrison, who produced scholarship and taught through her own example as a scholar, Thomas created an institutional space where other women could become productive scholars, teachers, and students. In her early years, Thomas was driven by desire to learn ancient Greek. She graduated in 1877 with a major in classics from Cornell University, where she followed lectures in Greek tragedy (while doodling pictures of her classmates in the margins) and proclaimed Agamemnon her favorite (nicknaming one of her girlfriends “Clytie” after Clytemnestra). But her ambitions to become a classical scholar were thwarted when she tried to pursue graduate studies at Johns Hopkins with Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, the university’s distinguished professor of Greek and president of the American Philological Association. In her early journals Thomas wrote that she had visited “The Greek Professor in his sanctum sanctorum” and received permission to attend his biweekly classes on “Practical Exercises in Greek.”39 But she was denied access to his advanced seminar because her Greek was not up to par, as she recorded with frustration: How absolutely impossible is my knowledge of Greek and it does seem hopeless and then after all—there seems to be something degrading in the minute study classical notes require. What difference can it make if a second a is used once or twice in a certain writer? I cannot bend my mind to it and yet I must. I must now be a good scholar or nothing. (122) Dancing Greek Letters

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This daily struggle with Greek led Thomas to ask herself whether “minute study” for philological training was the best way to know Greek: “After all can I possibly get any more infinite shades of meaning out of the Greek than the translator—is this trouble after all worth it? Is it not a waste of one’s life?” she wrote in her journal: “I am absolutely at the threshold: inaccurate, badly trained, not able to write a sentence of correct Greek” (130). And yet even if the study of a dead language felt like “a kind of living death,” she concluded: But then if I had my choice this moment I know I would choose nothing else  .  .  . my precious Agamemnon—the one inspiration to study when I lose all heart! The pleasure I had from that, the sweet echoing of lines from it that fills the pauses of dressing and eating almost is worth it all— Perhaps my studying is all a mistake—if I only were more master of the subject I could tell better. (130) For Thomas, the painful discipline of learning Greek did not lead to mastery. Although she finally abandoned classical scholarship, disheartened, what remained was the “sweet echoing” of lines from Greek tragedy that she had learned by heart: a memory that filled her with pleasure for the rest of her life. As she went on to complete a Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in modern languages and linguistics at the University of Zurich, she retained a love of the ancient languages by staying “at the threshold” between knowing and not knowing Greek. To perpetuate Ladies’ Greek in future generations, Thomas expected students to learn classical languages in order to be admitted to Bryn Mawr and initiated into college life. According to “Requirements for Admission” listed in 1884, “that method of studying Greek and Latin is recommended, which treats them as far as possible like living languages.”40 The college curriculum required at least one course in ancient Greek, and through extracurricular activities students also made it more like a living language: in the translations, imitations, and parodies of Greek literature published by students in college magazines like The Lantern, and in the songs and ceremonies performed by students in Greek as part of Lantern Night at Bryn Mawr College. This longstanding tradition, going back to the early years of the college, is an induction of freshman students by the sophomore class, who walk in a procession with lanterns while singing: Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη, θεά Μαθήματος καὶ σθένους, Σὲ πάρ’ ἡμεῖς ἴμεν, 220

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Ἱρεύσουσαί σοι δεινῇ Ἄκουε! Ἄκουε! Μακάριζε, αἰτοῦμεν, Ἥμῖν συγγίγνου ἀεί, Μάκαρ θεὰ, ἄκουε, Ἄκουε! Ἄκουε! Ἱέριζε νῦν τοὺς λύχνους, Ἀεὶ φανῶς φάοιεν Δαμπρύνοντες τὴν ὁδόν, Μελὰν φανὸν ποιοῦντες, Ἄκουε! Ἄκουε!

Pallas Athena, goddess of learning and strength, We come to you to worship you, dread goddess. Bless us we pray; give us wisdom. Be with us always, blessed goddess, hear! Sanctify our lanterns now, to shine forever clearly. Lighting the way, making bright the dark. Entitled “Consecration of Lanterns,” the song was written in Greek by two Bryn Mawr students in 1893 and adopted for Lantern Night in 1901. It begins with an invocation to Pallas Athena, praying to the goddess of learning and power to look kindly upon the students, to grant wisdom and lead them on the path from darkness to light. But it is also an exercise in learning to “hear” ancient Greek, in the repetition of the refrain: Ἄκουε! Ἄκουε! Hear! Hear! In “Fifty years of Bryn Mawr College,” Lantern Night is described as “a solemn ritual performed in mysterious moonlit darkness to the sound of singing in a strange tongue, to the light of colored lanterns swinging as a black-robed line of girls paces down the cloisters. It is the ritual by which a strange girl becomes a part of Bryn Mawr” (11). These initiation rituals, introducing strangers into a community defined by “a strange tongue,” were a ritualization of Ladies’ Greek, making a foreign language familiar to the students of Bryn Mawr college. They were taught to “know” Greek not only in the classroom but outside the classroom as well, for extracurricular activities such as the freshman Greek cheer. At the turn of the century, this was the cult of Ladies’ Greek that Eva Palmer (later Sikelianos) entered as a student at Bryn Mawr. Before starting college Eva Dancing Greek Letters

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had fallen in love with ancient Greek, as she recalls the moment “when I first looked into Jowett’s Plato” in her autobiography: I was about eighteen. It was an incredible experience which had no breaks, no contrast. From the first Dialogue to the last my feet did not seem to touch the ground, and wherever I went I had the sensation of flying. ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken.’ (49) Quoting Keats’s famous sonnet on reading Homer in translation, Eva gives a highly literary representation of herself at a point when she too could read Greek only in translation, and yet she presents her experience as immediate: a sensation of flying where her feet leave the ground, turning her encounter with Greek into an ecstatic moment that takes her outside herself and makes her spirit dance. She invented the title of her autobiography, Upward Panic, to express the rising movement toward a Greek idea that she sought to embody in her life and in her lifelong work on Greek drama (embodied in many forms, as Artemis Leontis argues in her biography of Eva). After meeting in person with M. Carey Thomas, whom she described as a figure of “great energy and latent grandeur” (27), Eva resolved to pursue her passion for Greek at Bryn Mawr. She dedicated six months to Latin in order to qualify for admission, “reserving the excitement of a first approach to Greek until I had passed beyond the outer barrier, and could study with Mortimer Lamsen Earle” (25). Thus she arrived in fall of 1896, eager to enter the inner sanctum of a college where she could learn the mysteries of an ancient language and participate in the Greek rituals for new students. For Eva, Greek became a language of and for desire, especially between women; Leontis speculates that Eva’s Greek passions may have gotten her into trouble at Bryn Mawr, as she was required to leave the premises for a year, and never returned to finish her degree. Eva herself recounts (somewhat ambiguously) that “after this initiation into the possibilities of college life” (27) she left with enough Greek studies to dedicate to the revival of Greek drama. She turned to “reading translations of Greek plays, Gilbert Murray’s and others, and finally to the critical studies of scholars concerning the Greek Theatre,” including Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (“but even with this I agreed only on part,” she commented) and returning to ancient views of Greek tragedy: “The tragic chorus is the union of poetry, music and gymnastics” (Plato) and “the tragic chorus expresses in movement the character, the sufferings and the actions 222

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of the actors” (106). For Eva the chorus was most important: in the choruses of Greek tragedy, she could imagine the mobilization of Greek letters, reanimating an ancient language by making it move through the body in song and dance. Following the production of Prometheus Bound that she directed in 1927 for the first Delphic Festival in Greece (see Chapter Two), Eva traveled back to America to raise funds for a second festival. Although the fundraising failed, she received much publicity for her lecture tour, which included a stop at her alma mater. A splashy headline appeared in the Bryn Mawr College News in February of 1928: “mme sikelianos tells of delphi.” The article reported that “Mme Sikelianos in her blue-green Grecian draperies, sandals, unbound red hair, was an unusual figure for the Taylor Hall platform.” The central message of her lecture was to persuade her audience that “the ancient Greek ideal, revived, is the true ideal of America as well.” She also elaborated her theories of the chorus which “gave the effect of a varying pantomime almost like a moving frieze,” and she explained that the main purpose of “the Delphi revivals are to revive interest in the chorus.” Explaining how difficult it was to “train choruses to make ideas understandable by motion,” Eva offered a live demonstration at the end of the lecture: Mme Sikilianos showed us some of the dance motions used in the revival of the ancient Greek chorus. These motions were taken from the figures on old vases. In spite of the cramping narrowness of the platform she, moving through the slow poses of the dance and singing the strange accompanying music, managed to convey a strong sense of the expressive beauty of the old choruses. Our interest in this Delphic revival was still further aroused by the beautifully woven and colored stuffs that Mme Sikilianos showed us. This strange silky-wool cloth hangs like the draperies of the old statues, giving a thin clinging effect at the same time that it has thick blanket-like folds. “Mme Sikelianos” was seen by the students as the very embodiment of the revival she was lecturing about. Wearing garments “like the draperies of the old statues” and “moving through the slow poses” to create the effect of a “moving frieze,” she animated her own theory of the Greek chorus, through a mode of translation that tried to make Greek tragedy “understandable by motion.” Eight years later, in 1935, Eva was invited to return to Bryn Mawr for the purpose of directing a production of Greek tragedy, as part of commencement ceremonies at the college and the celebration of the fiftieth year of its founding. Dancing Greek Letters

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5.3 Playbill for The Bacchae of Euripides, directed by Eva Palmer Sikelianos at Bryn Mawr College (1935). College Archives, Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library.

M. Carey Thomas herself was in attendance, a reminder of the cult of Greek that she had introduced to the first generations of women at Bryn Mawr. Since those early days, there had been a tradition of performing Greek drama, but always indoors on a traditional proscenium stage. In a break with tradition, Eva took her production outdoors and her choice of play was untraditional as well: The Bacchae. Jane Harrison’s reading of this Euripidean tragedy was a likely influence for Eva’s interpretation, as the playbill included an image of a maenad (figure 5.3), drawn from the same cylix Harrison had used to create her illustration of “a beautiful raging maenad” in Prolegomena (figure 5.2). The recirculation of this image suggests how broadly Harrison’s theories of myth and ritual in general, and of maenadism in particular, were circulating around women’s colleges. Eva’s production of The Bacchae took the next step, transforming Harrison’s scholarship on the ritual origins of Greek tragedy into a dramatic rite of passage for the women of Bryn Mawr College, linking past and future generations of alumni. 224

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5.4 Chorus for The Bacchae, directed by Eva [Palmer] Sikelianos at Bryn Mawr College (1935). College Archive, Bryn Mawr College.

In the Bryn Mawr College News, there were reports of Eva auditioning and training students for the production: “Bacchantes Rehearse” was the headline on May 15, 1935, along with a photograph featuring members of the chorus and cast (figure 5.4). Artfully arranged as a group in hand-woven costumes, they strike a range of angular poses that transform nineteenth-century Delsartism into a vision simultaneously more ancient and more modern. “The Bacchae of Euripides is being given in a new manner, far removed from the conventional methods,” the article announced, explaining that the “production is distinguished by the treatment of the chorus as an active medium for dramatic expression and by the use of a scheme of musical modes belonging to the ancient tradition of the Greek Orthodox Church.” With fifty undergraduates divided into groups of ten, each making separate patterns, “the possibilities for expression are endless in the types of dancing and the interplay of the various modes.” Rather than transitioning gradually from pose to pose (as prescribed in the Delsarte System of Expression, adopted by the Electra chorus at Smith College in 1889), Eva’s choreography for The Bacchae created a more rapid interplay of movements and gestures, juxtaposed in different groups and accompanied by flute and rhythmic beating of a drum. Eva kept a small notebook for rehearsing the choral odes, to be performed in English but with singing modeled on Byzantine music that was composed by Eva herself, connecting to a musical tradition that she believed originated Dancing Greek Letters

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5.5 Eva Palmer Sikelianos, notes for reciting the entry of chorus in The Bacchae. Benaki Museum— Historical Archives. Eva Palmer-Sikelianos archive. Inv. no. 189.

in Greek antiquity. She marked the musical modulations of the chorus as they sang, with notations to emphasize the rhythmic effect of the words (figure 5.5). This page from the parodos, where the chorus first enters, is one of the most mobile passages in The Bacchae: Go Bacchantes go go Go Bacchantes deck your selves Deck yourselves with gold That flows from Tmolus And with your tambors deeply rumbling Sing to Dionysos Evoe Evoe Evoe for Evios Evoe in glory for Evios the God When the sacred melodious flute Make echo the sacred cadence Which tends your train from mountain to mountain Then filled with rapture The Bacchante with eager limbs 226

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Like a young colt Following its mother in pasture Leaps forward, the Bacchante leaps forward With limbs eager and bounding. In Eva’s notebook, the words “go go” are marked below with four dots to lengthen the musical beat, while the other notations indicate melodic type and intervals associated with different modes. The musical movement of the maenads was scripted into the words they sang, creating speech acts to reveal the performative power of the chorus in the simultaneity of song and dance. Thus Eva sought to transform their words, “filled with rapture,” into a fully embodied, moving performance. To become a Baccahante that “leaps forward / With limbs eager and bounding,” every chorus member also received detailed instructions for dancing (figure 5.6). Movement had to be carefully practiced, first by learning how to walk “for beauty’s sake” and then how to run: “There is much running in the Bacchii and we must learn this.” There was special emphasis on moving the legs “forward through the air” and also a step-by-step explanation of the Bacchic shiver, “flinging both knee and head back at the same time, --Like this-----.” While the illustrations demonstrated what these motions should look like, even more important was what they should feel like: any attempt to “spring up into the air on a bent knee” will feel wrong, because “the very act of lifting yourself up into the air means that the strength must be on the leg on which you stand.” In the juxtaposition of “wrong” and “right” movement—illustrated in sketches of girls walking, lifting and leaping—the chorus was being trained to think kinesthetically through the motions of the body. Between her early studies of Greek at Bryn Mawr and directing a Greek tragedy at the college more than three decades later, Eva had come a long way in creating her own vision of Ladies’ Greek. But she was disappointed by the distance between her ideas about performing The Bacchae and the reality of the performance at Bryn Mawr. She complained that the most talented students were not available to work with her on this project, and reviewers agreed that the chorus was unconvincing. A performance of The Bacchae directed by Eva at Smith College the previous year had been more successful in creating a dramatic spectacle of dancing maenads, enthusiastically described by Lincoln Kirstein: A trumpet blew two phrases in the antique modes preserved by the Greek Orthodox Church, and the flash of a purple dress preceded the column of Dancing Greek Letters

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5.6 Walking, Lifting, Leaping. Instructions for dancing in the chorus of The Bacchae, directed by Eva Palmer Sikelianos at Smith College (1934) and Bryn Mawr College (1935). Benaki Museum— Historical Archives. Eva Palmer-Sikelianos archive. Inv. no. 189.

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Bacchants. Headed by Dionysos, fifty girls in clothes that for the first time to many made Greek sculpture alive, swept up and over the plain. Over their tunics were slung dappled panther skins. In their hands they brandished wands bound with oak-leaves. . . . The most impressive part of the play was the large choros. Divided into five choirs the girls danced and sang the action simultaneously. . . . When the choral-leader, a girl with red hair and real fury, crashed her brass cymbals and leapt into the circle, followed by her companions in antiphonal singing and miming, an atmosphere was evoked that was as ancient and pungent as the charred smoke of incense from the altar. The gestures were not from Isadora Duncan, but closer, if one needs a modern precedent to Nijinsky’s invention of an archaic plastic . . . it was ritual drama, danced tragedy, in the original and best sense of the word, a choreodrama. (25–26) In his book on the history of classical theatrical dancing, Kirstein recognized that Eva’s choreography was distinct from Duncan and other women dancing in a Greek style at the turn of the century. In directing The Bacchae, Eva had achieved a more integrated vision of “ritual drama” or “choreodrama” that was the culmination of music and song and dance all together. Even in Kirstein’s vivid prose, the experience of the event was difficult to put into words, but it may be imagined from a series of photographs of The Bacchae performed at Smith College. Eva’s self-conscious recreation of ritual is visible in the choral procession for the parodos (figure 5.7), where we see a flute player accompanying the chorus carrying thyrsoi in a stately march: following instructions, they had learned to walk “for beauty’s sake.” In other photographs we see carefully choreographed movement of the chorus as a collective body, one with the chorus all pointing in one direction with extended arms (figure 5.8), and another with the chorus in a ceremonial circle, lifting thyrsoi high in the air (figure 5.9). But the photograph that leaps out (literally) from these choral formations is the solitary figure of the chorus leader, suspended in mid-air (figure 5.10). Described by Kirstein as “a girl with red hair and real fury,” perhaps reminiscent of a younger Eva, this ecstatic Bacchante embodies the kinesthetic experience of modern maenads and recalls Eva’s memory of her first encounter with Greek literature: “my feet did not seem to touch the ground, and wherever I went I had the sensation of flying.” This dancing figure embodies Eva’s desire to make Greek tragedy move in new ways, performing what Yaeger might have called the transformability of Greek letters, and their volatility: a newfound freedom of movement for women, grounded in the Victorian legacy of Ladies’ Greek, but also leaping toward the future. Dancing Greek Letters

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5.7 Chorus in The Bacchae, directed by Eva Palmer Sikelianos at Smith College. Close-up of girls with branches and flute player, Senior Dramatics, Class of 1934. Photographer unknown. Creator unknown. College Archives, Smith College (Northampton, MA).

5.8 Chorus in The Bacchae, directed by Eva Palmer Sikelianos at Smith College (1934). Close-up of group with hands up, Senior Dramatics, Class of 1934. Photographer unknown. Creator unknown. College Archives, Smith College (Northampton, MA).

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5.9 Chorus in The Bacchae, directed by Eva Palmer Sikelianos at Smith College (1934). Circle of girls holding branches, Senior Dramatics, Class of 1934. Photographer unknown. Creator unknown. College Archives, Smith College (Northampton, MA).

5.10 Chorus Leader in The Bacchae, Senior Dramatics, Class of 1934. Photograph by Arnold Genthe, New York. Creator: Arnold Genthe. College Archives, Smith College (Northampton, MA).

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Ecstatically performative as Eva’s love affair with Greek letters was, it does not end with her. Far from it. As we have seen, the beginning of Ladies’ Greek spanned the entire nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, and its end is still not in sight. The fixation on an ancient language that characterized the phenomenon of Ladies’ Greek throughout the nineteenth century became by the beginning of the twentieth century a mobile personification of those dead letters, a dance to the music of ancient time in an ancient language that could only be “spoken” as a collective movement. This book is itself another performance of a deep attachment to Greek letters, and a performance of the many ways that so many women have been knocked off their feet. Whatever we make of our ongoing identification with the strange signs of a language no one can speak, with the characters of tragedies long gone, what never seems to fade in women’s accounts of their encounters with Greek tragedy (even in these fading photographs of The Bacchae) is the thrill.

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Postface Reading the Surface I began with E.B.B.’s “First Greek Ode” in my introduction, as a scene for reading and writing Greek letters, and I end with a return to that primal scene, where we confront a dead language that can never be completely deciphered. Into and out of that page of E.B.B.’s manuscript, and all the other archival materials reproduced in the pages of my book, I have projected a space for the performance of Ladies’ Greek. Here we have seen how women played out “the trick of Greek,” simultaneously reading Greek through English and English through Greek, in a linguistic transposition where each language is set into motion by the other. By collecting materials from the archives of Ladies’ Greek, what I have tried to make visible is how these women performed the act of translation, leading me to reflect further on how the archive might also be seen as the site for another performance of translation, my own. In Dust: The Achive and Cultural History, Carolyn Steedman observes that the archive is not only “a prosaic place where the written and fragmentary traces of the past are put in boxes and folders, bound up, stored, catalogued”; it is also “a place of dreams.”1 Like an archaic language, the archive is both a literal place and a literary space for a strangely specular double reading, where I found myself translating letters of dead women translating dead letters. I did not dream of reviving either that language or those women; I did not know what I was looking for exactly, yet I knew when I found it, “it” being the moment when the Greek alphabet suddenly became visible in the margins of what I was reading: οτοτοτοι in Woolf ’s Agamemnon notebook and reiterated in the letters of A. Mary F. Robinson; the verbs in μι memorized by E.B.B. and the alphabet written out by Annie Fields inside the cover of her diary (α to ω, forgetting ι); ΗΛΕΚΤΡΑ inscribed in a book dedicated to Janet Case, and illustrated in watercolors in the Smith College album; the mysteries of Jane Harrison’s δρῶμενον and the secret society of Φ Β Γ at Bryn Mawr, spelled out as a “luminous combination of Greek letters” by Edith Hamilton; and so on, κ. τ. λ . As a final speculation on the encounter with Greek letters in the archive, I present the example of Meta Glass. This was (yes, really) the name of a woman who received her B.A. and M.A. from Randolph-Macon Women’s College and a Ph.D. in Latin and Greek from Columbia University in 1912; she returned 233

6.1 “Delicacy of the passive,” marginalia (detail) by Meta Glass in Sophocles’ Antigone (New York: American Book Co., 1891), circa 1909. Original in color, 2010. Photograph by permission of Andrea Eis.

to teach classics at Randolph-Macon before going on to become president of Sweet Briar College in Virginia.2 It seems that Meta Glass knew little Greek before she entered Columbia, but she assiduously worked her way through a series of Greek texts that she annotated in pencil with her own notes and queries. The traces of her reading are visible in abundant marginalia, dating from 1909, in her personal copy of The Antigone of Sophocles: a late nineteenthcentury edition that has been photographed by artist Andrea Eis.3 Reflecting on the name of Meta Glass as a meta-narrative about Ladies’ Greek, we can translate these photographs of her writing into an allegory for reading the Woman of Greek Letters. In figure 6.1, for example, a page from the Greek text of Antigone has been photographed close-up to show a marginal comment written by Meta Glass on a line toward the end of the tragedy, after Creon has doomed Antigone to die alone in a dark cave. The chorus has just admonished Antigone that all mortals must die, and that there is honor for a woman to achieve fame both in life and in death. But Antigone is not consoled: “Oh, I am mocked!” she cries out, “Why do you insult me face to face, rather than waiting until I am dead?” Next to line 838, Meta Glass scribbled a note on “the delicacy of the passive—not—you—” in Antigone’s outcry: οἴμοι γελῶμαι should be translated as “I am mocked,” and not “you mock me.” In observing this delicate distinction—recalling Jane Harrison, who learned Greek “for the sheer love of its words and the delicacy of its syntactical relations”—Meta Glass allows us to reflect on the suspension of “I” in the 234

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6.2 Artwork by Andrea Eis, “Where do the depths come in? (Sophocles, Antigone; New York: American Book Co., 1891).” Original in color, 2008. Photograph by permission of Andrea Eis.

passive verb: the eye (her eye, my eye, your eye, the eye of the camera) remains suspended between grammatical subject and object in translating from Greek, “not you” but also not “me.” It would be a mockery, indeed, to read a woman writer “into” or “out of ” this Greek text, as if that would bring her back to life. Looking through a glass darkly (and not face to face) at Meta Glass, we see her reflected only in writing on the surface of the Greek text. Rather than discovering or uncovering her interiority, the photograph suggests an approach to close reading that stays at the surface, revealing from many different angles the literality of Greek letters. At least this is how I would read, or translate, the artfully enlarged photographs created by Eis, in her series entitled “Marginalia” (2008): a latterday representation of Ladies’ Greek, taken out of the archive and turned into an object for aesthetic contemplation. These artworks superimpose the Meta Glass marginalia on fragmentary images of Greek sculptures. By photographing at different angles, Eis invites us to look more closely at image and text in relation to each other, and to translate one into the other by reading obliquely across the surface. Such an oblique reading is announced in the very title of one of her works, “Where do the depths come in?” (figure 6.2). Here we see another page from the Antigone edition, where Meta Glass re-marked some editorial remarks on a difficult choral ode: a description of stormy winds stirring up the sea to bring mud to the surface (lines 590–591). The Greek phrase κελαινὰν θῖνα (“the dark sand at the bottom of the sea”) must have seemed hard to plumb. Puzzled by this densely metaphorical passage, Meta Glass underlined the editorial gloss “over the surface” and wrote in the margin: “Where do the depths come in?” The question is superimposed on a photograph of a fractured marble face, gazing blankly across the page at a word spelled out in English letters: antigone, simultaneously a transliteration of the name, a translation of the text that circulates in that name, and a transformation of the Postface

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word into a complex visual image. A period is placed at the end of antigone, directly below the question mark, as if to answer: “Where do the depths come in? antigone.” But the question can’t be answered by reading more deeply into the text of Antigone, nor can we look deeply into the empty eyes of the sculpture for an answer. This partially effaced figure, like the partially translated Greek text that has been superimposed on it, can only be read “over the surface.” If we want to see where the depths come in, we need to stay at the level of the letter, to look more literally at the interplay between the English letters and the Greek letters that may, or may not, be translated into the vision of a fractured female figure. Within a longer history of reading Antigone in particular, and the even longer history of translating Greek tragedy in general, this interplay of letters gives us another angle on a play that has been read from many angles, but may also be seen more literally as a surface that is not quite a human face. Rather than doing a “deep” reading, we can look through Meta Glass into the archives of Ladies’ Greek, where we see the Woman of Greek Letters as a multifaceted personification, created by a seemingly infinite series of reflections and refractions of letters written by women both in English and in Greek.

Refractions of Antigone The choice of Antigone for my allegorical reading of Ladies’ Greek is determined, if not overdetermined, by her reception as tragic icon and exemplary figure for modern ideas about tragedy from Hegel onward. Even compared to Oedipus, who has haunted the modern psyche since Freud, there is no figure that has been more read and reread and re-reread ad infinitum than Antigone: the proper name for “the Antigone legend” pluralized by George Steiner in Antigones, or renamed “the Antigone effect” by Bonnie Honig in Antigone, Interrupted, or remade in the name of world drama by critics collected in Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage.4 But in the process of reclaiming, interrupting, or performing Antigone as a classical tradition, what is often overlooked is the place of archival reading. Where else might we look for traces of Antigone, reflected or refracted in the encounter with Greek letters in the archives of Ladies’ Greek? How might we discover new angles on the histories of reception, and the field of classical reception studies, by tracing the transmission of Greek tragedy by women through various modes of translation, transcription, transliteration? Revolving around the question of knowing and not knowing Greek, translations of Greek tragedy by Victorian women tend to remain unknown, on the margins of literary and cultural history. 236

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One notable exception is George Eliot, whose “translations” of Antigone into her novels are by now canonical. Many critics have commented on the influence of Greek tragedy on her fiction, often read in relation to her 1856 essay, “The Antigone and Its Moral.”5 Eliot interpreted the tragic conflict of the Sophoclean tragedy as an opposition between individual and society: “Wherever the strength of a man’s intellect, or moral sense, or affection brings him into opposition with the rules which society has sanctioned, there is renewed the conflict between Antigone and Creon.”6 This abstract, somewhat Hegelian reading of Antigone is given psychological depth in characters like Maggie Tulliver in Mill on the Floss and Dorothea in Middlemarch, as individuals who come into conflict with their society through the strength of their (woman’s) intellect, moral sense, and affection. Refracted through these fictional characters we can also glimpse the formation of George Eliot’s own literary character, as a woman of Greek letters. She had lessons in Greek and Latin with “old Mr. Sheepshanks” and John Sibree, and read Greek tragedy with a passion, recording passages in her journals and commonplace books.7 Unlike her characters, Eliot’s desire for classical education did not have tragic consequences; although an early review of her novels corrected her use of accents in a quotation from Sophocles, she was praised for “traces of knowledge which is not usual among woman.”8 But like so many women, Eliot was skeptical about “knowing” Greek as an object of learning without feeling; what she valued in her private studies of ancient Greek was an affective relation to the language, for cultivating sympathy. Although Eliot did not learn Greek in a collegiate setting, she anticipated the culture of Ladies’ Greek that emerged during women’s entry into higher education in the following decades. The cultivation of sympathetic relations between women through reading Greek tragedy together is illustrated in a cartoon from Punch magazine in 1876, not long after the formation of women’s colleges in Oxbridge (figure 6.3). In “St. Valentine’s Day at Girton,” two women of letters pore over a letter written in Greek letters. Smoking cigarettes and reading Sophocles with apparent ease, they share a moment of amusement as the first one comments, “Charming, isn’t it? Gussie must have sent it from Oxford?” The second replies, “Yes, it’s out of the Antigone—the Love Chorus, you know. How much jollier than those silly English verses fellows used to send!” In this moment of intimacy between women, a desire for Greek seems to have displaced not only “those silly English verses” but also those silly fellows who used to send them; as Perry Williams points out in her essay on pioneer students at Cambridge, “the joke turns on the fear that an educated woman will be too much for an ordinary man.” And indeed, the chorus from Antigone they are reading together invokes eros as force beyond man’s control: Ἔρως ἀνίκατε Postface

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6.3 “St. Valentine’s Day at Girton,” Punch (February 26, 1876).

μάχαν, Ἔρως ὅς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις (“Eros undefeated in battle, Eros you destroy all things”). The subtext of the Greek quotation is left for the reader to translate: the battle of the sexes has been won by the women, it would seem, and there is even a hint that the men may be out of the picture altogether, if “Gussie” (ambiguously male or female) proves to be a girl from Oxford. Within and between the new women’s colleges, reading ancient Greek together might be a revelation of Greek eros that would reveal, in turn, a new language for eroticized relations among women. On the other side of the Atlantic, Antigone was passionately read by women as well. In “Victorian Antigone,” Caroline Winterer has traced the circulation of this figure in American culture between 1840 and 1900, “reaching an apotheosis in the early twentieth century, when Antigone became by far the most frequently performed classical play on American college campuses”; according to Winterer, “Victorian Antigone became a study in the selfless quality of appropriate feminine public action,” creating an opportunity for American women to 238

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perform feminine ideals of domestic piety as well as resistance to those ideals.9 In “The Sacrifice of Antigone” (1891), for example, the central character of this story by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps wins a student contest in Greek recitation by addressing “the plaintive and beautiful topic of Antigone”: “It was studious, it was graceful, it was becoming, it was perfect, it was Greek—it was Antigone. . . . She took the prize.”10 Not only is it becoming to play the role, she becomes it. But mastery of Greek does not release her from a life of servitude; barred by poverty from completing college, this Antigone dies, tragically. While the classical education of elite women at elite colleges contributed to the cultural imaginary of Ladies’ Greek, their performances of Greek tragedy did not necessarily lead to cultural transformation for all women. Indeed, in mapping out a longer historical trajectory in The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900, Winterer concludes that “college performances of Antigone reveal the pyrrhic victory of women’s classicism in the late nineteenth century, as it was transformed from a vehicle for political participation into a forum for internal self-perfection”; their identification with Antigone exemplifies what Winterer calls “the twilight of female classicism,” retreating from the public into a private sphere of selfcultivation.11 In this respect Winterer follows the story told by Christopher Stray in Classics Transformed about the history of classical education and the transformation of classics, leading to a gradual decline of Greek studies in the twentieth century. No doubt the classics curriculum was undergoing radical change in schools and universities on both sides of the Atlantic by the turn of the century, with fewer students required to learn classical languages. But I would draw a different conclusion from the materials I have found in the archives, where we see the ongoing recirculation and renegotiation of women’s desire for ancient Greek. Cultivating different ways to perform their personal identification with Greek letters, they went on to produce a public culture for the performance of Ladies’ Greek in the twentieth century, continuing to discover other forms of knowing and not knowing Greek, especially through the figure of Antigone. Consider, for example, a performance of Antigone on the campus of Spelman College in 1933. Founded as Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary in 1881 and developing into a liberal arts college during the 1920s, Spelman led the way among the historically black women’s colleges to develop basic literacy training into broader literary education. Although “Spelman’s Founders never agonized over the need to offer their Black female student the classical education which male students were being offered elsewhere,” the college was modeled on northeastern women’s colleges, and its early curriculum was designed for “creating Black female leadership for the uplift of Black communities.”12 To promote its Postface

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expanding cultural mission, the college employed Anne M. Cooke, a promising young woman with a B.A. in English Literature from Oberlin College, with ambitious plans for Spelman’s dramatics program.13 In 1933, she directed the Antigone of Sophocles in an English production by the University Players, as reported in The Spelman Messenger: Antigone was the first attempt on the part of the players to present a Greek drama, and much originality was used in adapting the plan of the old Greek theatre to modern conditions. The triple interpretation of speech, choreography, and music followed the Greek style; and the music was written on the Greek scale. The modern “space stage” was used, lights thrown on a black background giving the appearance of great depth.14 Adapting “the old Greek theatre to modern conditions” at a college for AfricanAmerican women who did not “know” ancient Greek, Cooke taught them other languages for interpreting Greek tragedy. Their translation into “Greek style” included not only recitation of speeches but also music and singing and dancing and costumes and masks, all designed by Spelman students, whose performance transposed the ancient text into modern poses: black bodies highlighted on a “black background” to produce a new impression of Greek tragedy. Most impressive, by most accounts, were the choral interludes where the chorus performed interpretive dances. The fifth choral ode on Eros, listed in the program as “Oh Love, in every battle victor owned,” was expanded into a “Dance of Death” choreographed and performed by Florence Warwick as the soloist, and photographed in a memorable pose (figure 6.4). Dressed in a black gown that reveals muscular, angled limbs (bent knee, elbow raised), she stands as chorus leader on a pedestal in front of a large white Greek column, surrounded by chorus members, dancing close to the floor in various dynamic gestures, and wearing stylized masks (more African than Greek). Going beyond the nineteenth-century tradition of Delsartean performance into modern dance, this photograph also redefines the spectacle of white femininity associated with Ladies’ Greek. Not only does it represent a highlight of the production, but it highlights the performance of classical literacy in different forms at Spelman, eager to demonstrate how the college was preparing African-American women to play a leading role in American culture. The photograph was published in The Campus Mirror (“Students Own Publication”) as part of a glowing review: “Florence Warwick and her colleagues won the house with their Dance of Death.”15 It was also printed in The Spelman Messenger, the official college publication, which reported with pride that 240

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6.4 Scene from Antigone, directed by Anne Cooke for Spelman College. University Players Production 1933. Courtesy of the Spelman College Archives.

Howe Memorial Hall at Spelman “was filled to capacity, and the performance was received with such enthusiasm that requests were made for a second performance.”16 Determined to spread news of this ground-breaking production, Cooke submitted the photograph to Theatre Arts Monthly, where to her disappointment it was rejected for publication.17 But it did appear in Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, as illustration for an article by Cooke writing about the future of American Negro Theatre.18 Reflecting on other theatrical traditions that might serve as a model, Cooke wondered: Is comprehension of the spoken word necessary to a complete understanding of the spirit and meaning of an author? When great drama is creatively acted and actors are keenly alive each minute, then thoughts and emotions come to the spectator through the human body which speaks a universal language, the pitch and tone quality of the voice and the rhythm and dance of the language. (59) This passage, printed adjacent to the photograph of the Spelman Antigone, suggests an understanding of the Sophoclean tragedy that depends less on “comprehension of the spoken word” and more on other ways of knowing Greek: a translation “through the human body” into a “universal language.” Here Greek letters are projected by Cooke into an idea of “the rhythm and dance of the language,” to be enacted by her students in the rhythmic dance of the chorus. Postface

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Like other performances of Greek tragedy by collegiate women, the Spelman Antigone became part of the institutional history of the college, with scattered documents collected in the Spelman College Archives. The photograph pops up in “Fine Arts at Spelman College,” an undated brochure, and the production is listed in The Spelman Messenger for a chronology of important dates, “Celebrating 75 Years: Art, Drama & Dance.”19 By integrating the arts in this memorable production of Greek tragedy, Spelman was enacting its own version of Ladies’ Greek, just a year before Eva Palmer Sikelianos began planning for performances of the Bacchae at Bryn Mawr. Of course, in each of these institutions, the cultural and indeed racial politics of classical education played out in different ways, for the performance of whiteness or blackness, as well as various class and gender identifications. To read the many faces of Ladies’ Greek, we will need to keep diversifying the archives; we have only begun to scratch the surface.

How to Read Ladies’ Greek This book is but the beginning of a larger cultural and literary history that remains to be written by many critics, working in many archives. Working against a common assumption that women were excluded from classics as a “masculine” domain of knowledge reception and production, a new generation of critics has already begun to explore the role played by women in nineteenthcentury classical discourses; from various perspectives, they demonstrate how women were actively recirculating or subverting male classicism, or producing parallel classicisms. This work broadens and depends our understanding of Victorian Hellenism, and opens up a wide range of new materials for us to read. I conclude here with a summary of basic principles, or axioms, for reading Ladies’ Greek. First, Ladies’ Greek is a diverse culture best understood through a combination of historical and literary reading. The desire for Greek that identified a “Woman of Greek Letters” is enacted within a larger matrix of classical discourses, cultural practices, social networks, and institutional structures, during a time of transition from informal to formal higher education for women. Their Greek studies are part of the longer history of classical education and the transformation of classics, continuing well into the twentieth century and beyond. But in situating women within this history, it is important to read the texts that they read: in order to understand their performance of female classical literacy, we need to pursue close reading of their textual engagement with the literality of Greek letters. 242

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Second, the Woman of Greek Letters is a literary figure that cannot be read only in biographical terms. In the interplay between lady’s Greek in the singular and Ladies’ Greek in the plural, we discover a recurring narrative of desire that has its own conventions: an early encounter with the Greek alphabet presented as a primal scene of falling in love with the language, a pedagogical experience that revolves around the pain and pleasure of learning Greek, an attempt to incorporate Greek into a body of writing that turns the woman writer into the very embodiment of Greek letters. Although her example seems exceptional, this exemplarity is generic in being figured as exceptional. Third, Ladies’ Greek involves a wide range of translational practices, as we have seen how women transcribed, transliterated, translated, transposed, transformed, and performed Greek tragedy. More than a movement from one language to another, these translations show women persistently moving between languages, in a continual mediation between Greek and English, between different modes of reading and writing, and across different media. And although my book has focused on women translating Greek tragedy, it remains for other critics to analyze their translations of many other classical texts as well, further demonstrating translation as an important mode of literary production. Fourth, Ladies’ Greek is a transatlantic phenomenon. The Woman of Greek Letters circulated on both sides of the Atlantic as a popular figure to distinguish a particular class of women writers in Victorian England and America. They developed networks for literary and cultural exchange by translating Greek, as a form of upward mobility and as a way to mobilize classical texts in the context of new movements to promote the cause of women. By reading these British and American women in relation to each other, we can open up a broader field for the study of women’s writing and histories of women’s higher education. Fifth, Ladies’ Greek gives us another perspective on the central role played by women in the popular reception of Greek tragedy. While nineteenth-century classicists were producing textual editions, philological commentaries, learned introductions, and scholarly translations of Greek tragedies, women made these texts available to a wider range of readers: as passionate amateurs, they turned to Greek tragedy not only to perform their passion for ancient Greek but also to transfer this experience to others through various creative transformations. Sixth, Ladies’ Greek changes the way we think more generally about classical reception. Over the past two decades, the critical model of a classical tradition inherited from the past has been replaced by a more dynamic model that focuses on the active recreation of classical texts and classical paradigms (including the very idea of the classical) at the “point” of reception. Instead of assuming the continuity or coherence of a classical tradition, we can see Ladies’ Postface

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6.5 “My pain,” marginalia (detail) by Meta Glass in Sophocles’ Antigone (New York: American Book Co., 1891), circa 1909. Source image for artwork by Andrea Eis. Original in color, 2008. Photograph by permission of Andrea Eis.

Greek as a complex pattern of many different “points” of reception in relation to each other. Furthermore, the point when a history of reception becomes visible should itself be historicized and theorized, in terms of our own assumptions about reading, both in English and in Greek. A genealogy of Ladies’ Greek therefore involves critical reflection on why and how we desire to learn ancient Greek as well. Seventh, the archives of Ladies’ Greek are an encounter with the eros and pathos of dead letters. Much as Victorian women writers desired to learn ancient Greek precisely because it was a dead language, no longer spoken, we can trace the afterlife of Greek letters in their writing without claiming to revive a “living” voice or reclaiming the “revival” of classics. By looking at these fragmentary materials in the archives—manuscripts and marginalia, sketches and photographs, diaries and notebooks, old periodicals and miscellaneous publications out of print—we perform archival reading as an identification of (and with) dead letters that informs and transforms our own affective and aesthetic relation to Ladies’ Greek. The image on the front cover of this book illustrates this multilayered reading of Ladies’ Greek. Looking back through the lens of Meta Glass, we see a marginal comment on line 318 in her edition of Antigone (“My pain—where it is”). This seems to be where Meta Glass stopped reading for the day, as it is marked with the word “stop” and a black line above the Greek letters ἐγώ (figure 6.5). Photographed by Eis, the word “where” is cut out of the image, leaving us to speculate about the phrase “My pain—it is” in relation to the Greek word 244

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6.6 Artwork by Andrea Eis, “My pain (Sophocles, Antigone; New York: American Book Co., 1891).” Original in color, 2012. Photograph by permission of Andrea Eis.

for “I.” Does this marginal comment refer to the pain of continuing to read the text in Greek, or the pain of stopping here? And whose pain is it, anyway? Again, Eis has created an artwork out of an enigmatic identification with ancient Greek, by superimposing the Antigone text with marginalia by Meta Glass on the photograph of a fractured face (figure 6.6). In this beautiful but painful image, the words written in English point toward the words printed in Greek, to the place where surface of text and surface of stone meet to create the face of Ladies’ Greek: an ἐγώ for translating “I” into and out of Greek letters.

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Notes Introduction: Women and the Greek Alphabet 1. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, First Greek Ode, To Summer. Elizabeth Barrett Browning collection of papers, 1764-[1973] bulk (1812–1883). May 4, 1819. Manuscript (inserted in “Poems by Elizabeth B. Barrett”). The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations. Thanks to my colleague H. D. Cameron for generous help in deciphering the manuscript. 2. I am grateful to Richard Jenkyns for pointing out that εξ αναντιας του πολου, a somewhat puzzling expression in classical Greek, may be found in Herodotus and Thucydides; the phrase also resonates with biblical Greek that the young Elizabeth was studying at time, as in the Twenty-Third Psalm of the Septuagint: “You spread a table before me against those who trouble me.” 3. The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Sandra Donaldson with Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone, Beverly Taylor, Simon Avery, Cynthia Burgess, Clara Drummond, Barbara Neri. See also Szladits, “New in the Berg Collection,” 4 and Entry D283 in Kelley and Coley, The Browning Collections, 285. 4. Hartley Coleridge, “Modern English Poetesses,” Quarterly Review 66 (1840): 382. 5. Linda Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters, 5. Peterson calls into question the “decline” of the woman of letters from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century (as argued by Norma Clarke in The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters), the “limitations” imposed on women writers (as argued by Dorothy Mermin in Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880), and the “impropriety” of female authorship (as argued by Mary Poovey in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer). 6. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh: A Novel Poem, Book I, 985–993. 7. For standard accounts of Hellenism in nineteenth-century England and America, see Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece; Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain; Winterer, The Culture of Classicism; Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity. 8. Sara Coleridge, “Translations from the Classics,” from Manuscript Notebook “Poetry 1823–1851,” Container 3.3 Sara Coleridge Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. I thank Peter Swaab for calling my attention to this manuscript. On Sara Coleridge and classics, see also Wallace (2015). 9. Sara Coleridge, Review of “The Princess: A Medley, by Alfred Tennyson,” The London Quarterly Review 164 (March 1848), 242, 245. 10. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 3, entry 5254. 11. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 53. 12. Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 124.

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13. Woolf, “Sara Coleridge” in Collected Essays, vol. 3, 222–226. 14. Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” 32. 15. Goldhill, Who Needs Greek?, 7. 16. The cartoon is reproduced by Claire Breay in “Women and the Classical Tripos 1869– 1914,” 48. The exhibition catalogue for “Women in Classics, Cambridge 1871–1948” shows a picture of the three organizers, Mary Beard, Gillian King, and Christopher Stray, in front of the same cartoon, framed. On the figure of the Girton Girl, see also Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics, 85–89. On the longer history of classical education in England, see Stray, Classics Transformed. 17. Quoted by Robinson (2002), 78. 18. Gilbert Murray, “Jane Ellen Harrison: An Address,” Proceedings of the British Academy 29 (1928). 19. Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, 3.Alongside Beard’s speculative biography (the aim of which is “to question the procedure by which the biographical person is invented,”11), see also Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison, and Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self. 20. Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History, 165, 171–172. 21. Amy Levy, “Xantippe: A Fragment,” University Magazine 5 (May 1880). The poem was reprinted in Xantippe and Other Verse (1881). On “Xantippe” in relation to Levy’s “awareness that as a Jewish woman she was doubly marginalized,” and on Levy’s years at Newnham, see Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters, 37–55; see also Pullen, The Woman Who Dared. For interpretations of “Xantippe,” see Scheinberg (1997), (1996), Weisman (2001), Hughes (2009). 22. For pointing me to this sketch, I am grateful to Linda Beckman who quotes a letter from Levy that reports on her tutorials with Jenkinson: “I have howled a good deal since I have been here. I must look up some Greek for the benefit of the worthy Mr. Jenkinson, at whose class we invariably roar” Beckman (2000), 42. Does Levy’s howling in laughter also refer to “howlers” in her flawed Greek? In “Women and Classics in Victorian Cambridge: Parallels and Contrasts,” Christopher Stray points out that Levy’s Greek is “either a failed attempt at accentual accuracy, or simply an impressionistic visual representation of Greek,” but he notes that “gentlemen had happily written unaccented Greek in the eighteenth century and until the early nineteenth century, Oxford University Press had published editions of Greek authors without accents” (Conference paper for 2009 APA seminar on “Classical Reception and the Education of Women”). 23. Altschuler (1990), 1. 24. Altschuler (1990), 26–27. 25. In notes for a lecture about her studies at Cambridge, Magill wrote: “It was a glowing description of that charming little home of letters that first inclined me to try Cambridge instead of joining a group of American women who at that time were making the most of such crumbs as were grudgingly let fall by some of the German universities.” Helen Magill White Papers, Cornell University. 26. “The Contributor’s Club,” The Atlantic Monthly 42 (November 1878), 637. Holding both a private and a public grudge against Harvard, she wrote: “I think there is all the difference in the world between the spirit of the Harvard and that of the Cambridge

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examinations for women. The people who planned the Harvard examinations wish that institution to hold out against women as long as possible; those who planned the Cambridge examination wish just the opposite” (p. 639). 27. Altschuler (1990), 48. 28. Altschuler (1990), 49–50. 29. Magill Notes p. 29. 30. Helen Magill White Papers, Cornell University. 31. ASSA Lecture, Helen Magill White Papers, Cornell University. 32. Swanwick (1899), 4. 33. Kelly (2008). 34. Stanton (1898/1971), 22–24. 35. Cooper, “The Higher Education of Women,” in A Voice from the South by a Black Woman from the South (1892/1988), 48. 36. On Cooper’s influence, see Karen Johnson (2002), Giles (2006), the special section in African American Review 43:1 (Spring 2009). On Cooper in relation to classical studies, see Haley (1993) and Chapter 2 in Heidi Morse (2014). For a critique of Cooper’s use of classical rhetoric to “uplift the race,” see Gaines (1996). 37. Stark (1979). 38. Eliot’s reading of Greek tragedy has been widely discussed. See especially King (1978), Joseph (1981), Wiesenfarth (1982), McClure (1993), Easterling (1994), Steiner (1996), recent chapters on Eliot in Hurst (2006), Fiske (2008), Olverson (2010). 39. Booth (2004), 184, 11. 40. Fuller (1994), 135. For further discussion of Fuller’s Iphigenia see Steele (2001). On the various turns of translation throughout Fuller’s work, see Zwarg (1995). 41. De Quincey, quoted by Hall and Macintosh (2005), 328. A photo of Faucit is reproduced in their chapter, “Antigone With Consequences.” On Antigone performed by women in late nineteenth-century America, see Winterer (2001) and Foley (2012), 125–132.

Chapter One. The Spell of Greek 1. Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice, Vol. 2 (1990), 116. References to this edition of Woolf ’s early journals will be cited in the main text as Apprentice with page number. 2. Woolf, Letters Vol. 1 (1975), 72. References to this edition will be cited in the main text as Letters by volume and page number. 3. Notebook on the Libation Bearers of Aeschylus (begun January 1907), 4. From Virginia Woolf ’s Holograph Reading Notes in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. On Woolf ’s reading notebooks, see Silver (1983), 146. 4. Woolf, Diary Vol. 2 (1978), 196. 5. Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, Vol. 2 (1954), 208. References to this edition will be cited in the main text as Diary by volume and page number. 6. The notebook has been microfilmed by the New York Public Library for the Berg Collection (Berg Reel 13) and can be viewed on CD-Rom, Woolf (1997). 7. Woolf (1925b), 31. Reference to this edition of The Common Reader will be cited in the main text by page number.

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8. Browning (1877), Preface and lines 1066–1067. 9. Litzinger and Smalley (1970), 443. On Browning’s Agamemnon translation, see also Prins (1989), Roberts (1991), Reynolds (2003), Macintosh (2005), Prins (2015). 10. Woolf (1985), 125. 11. Warr (1900), xxxi–xxxii. On Warr, see also Macintosh (2005), and Hall and Macintosh (2005), chapter 16. 12. For a photo of Case in the role of Athena, see Easterling (1999), 29. 13. Alley (1982), 298. 14. Case (1914), 7. I thank Christopher Stray for calling this article to my attention. 15. Case (1914), 16–17. 16. Alley (1982), 299. 17. Marcus speculates that “Woolf supposedly contributed to Walter Headlam’s translation of the Agamemnon,” and suggests “it would be interesting to compare her translation (in the Berg collection, unpublished) with his” (1994), 250. See also Dalgarno (2001), 45–46. 18. Verrall (1913), xlix. 19. Goldhill (1999), 380. In his 1891 pamphlet On Editing Aeschylus, Headlam published a scathing attack on Verrall; for further discussion of the Headlam-Verrall controversy, see also Goldhill (2002), 231–243. 20. Woolf (1929), 26. 21. Shattuck (1987), 278. On Woolf and Harrison see also Maika (1987), Robinson (1994), Carpentier (1998). 22. Harrison (1919), 5–6. 23. Woolf (1954), 257. 24. Quoted from Woolf ’s unpublished reading notes by Fowler (1999), 221. On Woolf ’s Greek studies, see also Alley (1982), Herman (1983), Fowler (1983), Oldfield (1996), Dalgarno (2001), Kolocotroni (2005), Fernald (2006), Koulouris (2011). 25. Warr (1900), 155. 26. Verrall (1889), xlv, lvi. Verrall concurs with the scholar A. Sidgwick in quoting his description of the Cassandra scene. 27. Headlam (1910), 36. 28. As reported in Vanity Fair, quoted in Beard (2000), 96. Beard notes that Virginia Woolf ’s cousin J. K. Stephen played the role of Hector in this production. 29. On Dene as Cassandra, see Marshall (1998), 172; Macintosh (2005). 30. In a letter to John Addington Symonds dated February 18, 1879, A. Mary F. Robinson wrote, “I should like to get up a yet more ambitious undertaking, to play Agamemnon in the original! (Fancy poor Aeschylus the prey of amateurs at private theatricals!). . . . I can’t think of an Agamemnon . . . I might ask Mr. Browning, he is quite young in his ways and might cover his venerable hairs with a wig!” French National Library MS, Fonds Anglais 248.f.32. 31. Letter from A. Mary F. Robinson to John Addington Symonds, dated February 1, 1879. French National Library MS, Fonds Anglais 248.f.26 verso. 32. Hughes (1936), 105. 33. Hughes (1936), 142. 34. Benson (1896). 200–201.

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35. The Saturday Review, 24 November, 1900. Reprinted in Beerbohm (1969), 325. Beerbohm contrasts the academic extravaganza at Cambridge with an open-air production at Bradfield College: “In the overt theatre of Bradfield, where we saw the Agamemnon last summer, the original spell of the tragedy seemed to fall on us in all its fullness,” adding the admonition that “the committee of fourteen dons responsible for the Greek play at Cambridge would have been wiser not to project the Agamemnon this year, not to challenge so direct a comparison with Bradfield” (1969), 322–323. 36. Times (5 March, 1921), Times (5 March, 1921), Times (19 November, 1900). In surveying Greek plays at Cambridge, J. H. Edwards also notes that ‘the Cassandra of Mr J. F. Crace will be the best-remembered part of this performance’ (1909), 5. 37. Granta Souvenir: The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1900), published by permission and dedicated to the Agamemnon Committee, in the Cambridge Greek Play Archive at Cambridge University. 38. Granta Souvenir, 28. 39. It is possible that Woolf saw the Cambridge Greek Play in 1900, as there is an inscription in a book that Thoby gave to her, dated 18 November 1900, “being the day after the performance of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus at Cambridge.” See Fowler (1999), 229. 40. On the performance of Ajax as the first Cambridge Greek Play, see Easterling (1999), 31–36. 41. “Woolf ’s opening sentence reads like a response to her cousin,” Dalgarno observes (2001), 61. For further discussion of J. K. Stephen, who believed “the Greek language is the most perfect of languages . . . which he proves by the effect of Greek on the audience of the Cambridge Greek Play,” see Goldhill (2002), 241. On the compulsory Greek debates at Cambridge, see Judith Raphaely in Stray (1999), 71–94. 42. Yorkshire Post, 3 March, 1921. 43. Daily Telegraph, 7 March, 1921. 44. Times, 5 March 1921. 45. Daily Telegraph, 7 March, 1921. 46. New Cambridge, 5 March, 1921. 47. Sheppard (1927), 16–17. 48. Sheppard (1927), 30–31. 49. Times, 3 March, 1921. 50. Trevelyan (1920), 38. 51. Bennett (1923), 13–14. 52. Woolf, Vol. 2 (1966), 114. References to Woolf ’s essays in this edition will be cited in the main text as Essays with volume and page number. 53. Cf. Woolf ’s transcription of this line (line number 937 in her notebook) to the translation (line number 1035 in his edition) in Verrall (1889), 127 [(1904) 203]. 54. Fowler (1999), 217. 55. The Years, 49–50. The passage is quoted by Fowler (1999), 220. 56. Dalgarno (2001), 33. In chapter 3, Dalgarno goes on to read Woolf ’s Agamemnon translation in relation to Mrs. Dalloway as a revision of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. 57. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925a), 24–25.

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58. L. Woolf, Beginning Again (New York, 1963). 59. Lee (1999), 194–196.

Chapter Two. ΙΩ in Prometheus Bound 1. Aeschylus (1983), lines 460–461. Unless otherwise noted, Greek lines from Prometheus Bound are cited from this edition. 2. Leontis (1995), 204. 3. On the invention of writing in relation to Greek tragedy, and the performance of letters in Prometheus Bound in particular, see De Kerckhove (1979), Segal (1986), Svenbro (1990). 4. Steiner (1994), 8. 5. Morrell (1773) was followed by a translation of the entire Aeschylean corpus in Potter (1777). By the early nineteenth century, Prometheus Bound began to circulate in an increasing number of English verse translations. 6. On Prometheus in British Romanticism see Curran (1986). 7. Hurst (2006), 9. On women translating Aeschylus, see also Lorna Hardwick, “Women, Translation and Empowerment” (2000) and “Reverence and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century Translation” in Hardwick (2000), 23–42. 8. Browning (1833). E.B.B. immediately withdrew this book from circulation. The 1833 translation is reprinted, with an introduction by Alice Meynell, in Browning (1896). Passages from the 1833 translation and translator’s preface by E.B.B. will be cited from Meynell’s edition. 9. Browning (1833), 9. All quotations from the 1833 translation and the translator’s preface by E.B.B. are given with page numbers from this edition. 10. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Prometheus Bound, holograph draft with author revisions” n.d. MS Box 2 (6), Browning Family Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 6. I am grateful for permission to consult this manuscript, a fair copy written by E.B.B. of the 1833 translation with some draft revisions. 11. Kelley and Hudson (1984– ) Vol. 1, 350. References to the Brownings’ correspondence will be cited in main text as BC with volume and page number. 12. “May 1. 1832: Number of lines which I can repeat,” Holograph 1832, 1 page. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, MS 21116813. 13. Browning (1969), 20. References to Diary will be cited in main text. 14. Stanza 9, “Wine of Cyprus, Given to me by H. S. Boyd, Author of ‘Select Passages from the Greek Fathers,’ etc., To whom these stanzas are dedicated,” in Browning (2010). 15. See, e.g., the introduction to Browning (1955). On E.B.B.’s “unrequited love for Mr. Boyd,” see Leighton (1986), 57; on E.B.B. as Dorothea to Boyd’s Casaubon, see Cooper (1988a), 17; on E.B.B.’s jealous attachment to Boyd, see Dally (1989); on E.B.B.’s rivalry with Boyd, see Simons (1990); on her “reverential” devotion to Boyd, see Drummond (2006), 521–528. 16. Browning (1969), xl, xliii. Philip Kelley’s Preface includes a dramatic description of breaking the seals on a black box and discovering the diary, “exactly one hundred years after the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning”; he adds that “the somewhat obsessive quality of her friendship with Hugh Stuart Boyd became apparent” (xi–xii). 252

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E.B.B. mentioned the diary in her correspondence: “Once indeed, I kept a diary in detail & largely; &, at the end of the twelve months, I was in such a crisis of self disgust, that there was nothing for me but to leave off the diary. Did you ever try the effect of a diary on your mind? It is curious—especially where elastic spirits & fancies are at work upon a fixity of character & situation (BC 7:353). Now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the diary includes a great deal of marginalia in Greek and Latin, especially passages related to readings with Boyd, demonstrating again E.B.B.’s fixation on “some Greek upon the margin—lady’s Greek.” 17. Diary 223. To prove her scholarly expertise to Boyd, E.B.B. referred to multiple editions of Aeschylus, including not only Bothe and Blomfield but also Scholefield. In the footnotes to her 1833 translation of Prometheus Bound (eliminated from the 1850 revision), E.B.B. frequently cited Blomfield but also argued against some of his readings. 18. E.B.B. refers here to a translation from Sophocles’ Electra, included in Boyd’s Thoughts on an Illustrious Exile: Occasioned by The Persecution of the Protestants (1815). 19. E.B.B. refers here to Boyd’s translations in Select Passages of the Writings of St. Chrysostom, St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. Basil (1806). Boyd liked to read and translate classical literature alongside the Greek Christian poets; he had also appended Christian verse to his translation of Agamemnon in 1823. Hence the Christian overtones in E.B.B.’s praise of his work as a translator. 20. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Prometheus Bound, holograph draft with author revisions,” 48. 21. Leighton (1986), 49–50. For autobiographical readings of “The Tempest,” see Miller (1952), 92; Hayter (1965), 26. On “the Promethean struggle” within E.B.B. see Mermin (1989), 51–53; on the poem as E.B.B.’s revision of the Romantic sublime, see Stone (1994), 66–74. 22. The Gentleman’s Magazine 103 (June 1833), 610–611. 23. Hillard (1842). 24. On reciprocal translation of Greek in the courtship correspondence, see Prins (1991). 25. On the Promethean plot in courtship correspondence, see Karlin (1987), 237–250. 26. Dated ca. 1850, these lines are transcribed in the hand of Robert Browning, and marked “Translated by E.B.B.” See Kelley and Coley (1984), entry D1166. I am grateful to the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University for permission to consult this manuscript. 27. For more detailed comparison of the two Prometheus translations see Falk (1988), and Drummond (2006). 28. On E.B.B.’s ongoing engagement with Greek both in and beyond Aurora Leigh, see Falk (1991), Wallace (2000), Hurst (2006), chapter 3. On E.B.B.’s translations of Psyche as “a cousin to wandering Io,” see Loeffelholz (1991), 74. 29. The Athenaeum, No. 2005 (31 March 1866), 425. 30. The Contemporary Review Vol. 2 (May-August 1866), 448. 31. Forman (1871), 182. 32. Stark (2006), 126. 33. Hardwick (2000), 31. Notes to Chapter Two

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34. Webster (1879), 61. 35. Reynolds (2006), 66–67. 36. The Athenaeum, No. 1974 (26 August 1865), 275. 37. The Westminster Quarterly (1 October 1865), 360. 38. Bruce (1903), 90. 39. Letters from Swanwick to Browning, dated February 11, 1873 and December 10, 1877, in Armstrong (1934), 59, 74. Browning’s copy of Dramas of Aeschylus, Translated by Anna Swanwick was preserved in his personal library: see Entry A20 in Kelley and Coley (1984). 40. Quoted in Bruce (1903), 131, and Moore (1932), 66. Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper were devotees of Robert Browning, and compared his marriage to their own union as “Michael Field.” 41. Introduction to Prometheus Bound in Swanwick, vol. 2. (1873), 154. 42. Letter to Swanwick from Rev. W. H. Channing, quoted in Bruce (1903), 89. 43. On the history of women in the Cambridge Classical Tripos, see Breay (1999). 44. The Girton Review, March 1887. 45. Case (1905), 26. 46. Case (1904), 100. 47. Case (1914), 7. 48. Case (1905), 5, 14–15. 49. Girton Review, March 1905. 50. Case (1914), 23. 51. The Woman’s Journal: Boston, Saturday, July 27, 1878. 52. Howells (1968), 40. 53. “148 Charles Street,” in Cather (1936), 69. 54. Harris (2002), 119. 55. Roman (1990), 5; Gollin (2002), 15–18. 56. In addition to her active participation in abolition, women’s suffrage, and the Associated Charities of Boston, Fields organized the Women’s Education Association for Boston University and supported the formation of Radcliffe College and Wellesley College. She also did fundraising for the Women’s Education and Industrial Union, encouraging the useful occupation for working women alongside the aesthetic education of upperclass women. See Roman (1990), 75–88, and Gollin (2002), 171–188. 57. Annie Fields, “A Few Words about ‘Atalanta in Calydon’  .  .  . perhaps unfinished,” inserted into scrapbrook. James T. Fields Addenda, Box 6 (1), Huntington Library. I am grateful to the Huntington for permission to consult the papers of Annie Fields. 58. Annie Fields, “The Flight of Io,” manuscript poem in notebook labeled “Manchester, 1880.” Huntington Library, James T. Fields Addenda, Box 2 (8) Notebook 3. 59. See list of “Unpublished Manuscripts” in Roman (1990), 185. 60. Loeffelholz (2004), 167. 61. Fields also included nearly forty pages of notes at the end of the volume, beginning with a quotation from Hegel (comparing “the Greek world with the period of adolescence” in his Philosophy of History) and going on to quote at length many passages from French, English, German writers as well as classical scholars writing about Greek tragedy and the history of Greek literature in general: all in service of educating the American reader as well as demonstrating the self-education of the writer. 254

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62. Fields (1866), 1. 63. Letters from Warner and Longfellow to Fields, quoted by Gollin (2002), 204. 64. Letter from Stowe to Fields, quoted by Harris (2002), 151. 65. The Atlantic Monthly 47.281 (March 1881), 427. 66. The Literary World 11.24 (November 20, 1880), 408. 67. During their first Grand Tour of Europe in 1859, Mr. and Mrs. Fields met Mr. and Mrs. Browning in Rome. The visit was recorded by Fields in a journal entry for 14 February 1859 (see Gollin [2002], 29). Like so many American women, Fields mourned the death of E.B.B. in 1861 as a personal loss. 68. Spofford (1916), 13. 69. Quoted by Gollin (2002), 250. 70. Letter from Bryn Mawr written by Edith to Margaret Hamilton, dated ca. 1895. Hamilton Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. I am grateful to the Schlesinger Library for permission to consult the papers of Edith Hamilton. 71. Reid (1967), 36. 72. Bacon (1980), 308. 73. Citation for Edith Hamilton, awarded by Bryn Mawr College in 1960. Hamilton Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Box 3. 74. Hamilton (1940), 92–93. The “Prometheus and Io” section (95–99) includes excerpts from Hamilton’s own translation of the Io episode in Prometheus Bound. 75. Letter from Edith Hamilton to Dorothy Bruce, dated April 21, 1926. Hamilton Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. 76. “The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, Translated with an Introduction” in Theatre Arts Monthly 11 (July 1927), 545–46. 77. Hamilton (1937), 18. 78. Bowra, introduction to 1963 reprint of Hamilton (1930), xvii. 79. Hallett (2009), 153–155. See also Hallett (1996–1997). 80. Hamilton’s journey to Greece, at the age of ninety, is described by Reid (1967), 114. Hamilton was invited to the Athens Festival by Bourlos, the actor who had played Prometheus for the Delphi Festival in 1927, and who revived the role in 1959, delivering his lines in modern Greek while the rest of the play was performed in Hamilton’s English translation. The mixing of languages and politics in the American and Greek versions of Prometheus caused some controversy in Athens, where Hamilton was seen as the mouthpiece for American democracy in the midst of the Cold War. 81. Hamilton (1927), 557. 82. Hamilton (1964), 48. 83. Letter from Edith Hamilton to Eva Palmer Sikelianos, dated 1935(?). 84. Letter from Eva Palmer Sikelianos to Edith Hamilton, dated December 1, 1950. Benaki Archive, Athens. I am grateful to Artemis Leontis for calling this letter to my attention. 85. After two years as a student, Palmer left Bryn Mawr in 1900. On her return to Bryn Mawr to deliver lectures on Greek tragedy and direct a performance of the Bacchae, see Chapter 5. 86. Palmer’s interest in dance developed in relation to the Delsarte movement in America and modern dancers like Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis, and Ted Notes to Chapter Two

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Shawn, and also through Palmer’s own participation in Greek-style theatricals and masques with Natalie Barney’s circle in Paris; see Leontis (2015). See also Michelakis (2010). 87. For a photograph by Nelly of Io, in a contorted, angular pose wearing a mask and a hand-woven costume from the 1927 production of Prometheus Bound at Delphi, see Wiles (2007), 91. 88. Payne (1961). 89. Leontis, The Alternative Archaeologies of Eva Palmer Sikelianos (forthcoming).

Chapter Three. The Education of Electra 1. Hall and Macintosh (2005), Foley (2012); on Greek drama in the Americas, see also the essays collected in Bosher et al. (2015). 2. On “pious” readings of Electra in nineteenth-century schoolbooks and scholarly criticism, and “how Electra lost her piety” in later interpretations, see Goldhill (2012), 201–230. 3. Jebb, Electra (1867), xiv. 4. Jebb, Electra (1894), xlii. 5. Jebb, Electra (1894), xlii. 6. For discussion of Electra in Victorian art and Leighton’s Electra in particular as “an important phase of the reception of the heroine in the visual arts,” see Bakogianni (2011), 119–151. 7. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” V. 8. Loraux (2002),82. “To be sure, the adverb and the interjection—a naked cry of sorrow, mourning transformed into pure vocal emissions, ought to have nothing in common,” and yet “there are numerous expressions of mourning where aei seems to summon up aiai.” Loraux (2002), 35–37. 9. Meredith (1975), 9 notes that Elizabeth Barrett marked Electra’s lament in Greek and that she later described the loss of her brother in similar terms. 10. “Greek Plays at the Universities, by a Graduate of Girton,” The Woman’s World 1 (1888), 121. The article was written by Janet Case and commissioned by Oscar Wilde; see Ross (2013), 111, 239. 11. London Times, November 30, 1883. 12. Pictorial World, December 1, 1883. 13. The Academy, December 1, 1883. 14. See Stray (1999) and Breay (1999). 15. The Girton Review, December 1882, pp. 4–5. 16. Spectator, Dec. 1 17. Letter from Professor Postgate, November 26, 1883. Courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge. 18. Inscription from Margaret Cobden and Annie Cobden-Sanederson to Janet Case in Omar Khayyam, Poems from the Persian. Courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge. 19. Notices of “The Classical Club” in The Girton Review 1883–1885 (Numbers 7–12). It is reported in 1885 that C. M. Jebb and J. F. Coulter were elected presidents for the ensuing year. 256

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20. Letter from Margaret Llewelyn Davies to Miss McMorran, July 23, 1937. Girton College Archive. 21. “In Memoriam Janet Elizabeth Case,” Girton Review 105 (1937), 41–42. 22. Girton Review 6 (December 1883), 1. 23. Girton Review 5 (July 1883), 11. 24. Letter to J. E. Case from Sir Charles Newton, November 18, 1883. Girton College Archive. 25. Girton Review 6 (December 1883), 3. 26. Girton Review 6, (December 1883), 3–4. 27. Jebb, Electra 1894, xxxvii–xxxviii. 28. Edith Hall (1999), 290–291. 29. I am grateful to Jill Lamberton for sharing with me this excerpt from the unpublished journals of Alice Longfellow, at the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Mass. 30. For further discussion, see Lamberton (2007). 31. On the entry of these and other women into classical studies in England and America at the turn of the century, see Altschuler (1990), McManus (1997), 24–35; Beard, King, and Christopher Stray (1998); Calder and Hallett (1996–1997). 32. The Girton Review, March 1886, 9–11. 33. “Resolution adopted by vote of the Smith College Alumnae Council February 19, 1932,” signed by Elizabeth S. Dickerman class of 1894 and Anna A. Cutler class of 1885. Smith College Archive. 34. Tyler (1923). 35. Tyler (1891). 36. The Electra of Sophocles with Notes by R. C. Jebb, Revised and Edited, with Additional Notes by R. H. Mather of Amherst College (1873, Repr. 1894). 37. Tyler (1891), 23–24. 38. Tyler (1891), 27. 39. Stebbins (1902) quoted by Ruyter (1999), 18. On the place of Stebbins in American Delsartism, see also Donawerth (2012) and Bordelon (2016). 40. Springfield Republican, June 14, 1889 (reprinted in Tyler, 62–63). 41. The Literary World, July 8, 1889 (reprinted in Tyler, 63–64). 42. On the history of this sculpture and its various identifications, see Haskell and Penny (1981), 288–289. I am grateful to Kate Nichols for pointing it out to me. 43. Springfield Republican, June 14, 1889, reprinted in Tyler (1891), 62; Tyler (1891), 62. 44. New York Tribune, June 15, 1889. 45. Alumnae Letters, Smith College archive. 46. On Margaret Anglin’s performances of Greek tragedy in the early twentieth century, see Foley (2012), 47–61. 47. Foley (2012) quotes this description of Anglin (53) and reproduces the portrait of Anglin as Electra (57), who also appears as iconic figure on the front cover of Foley’s book.

Chapter Four. Hippolytus in Ladies’ Greek 1. Sackville-West (1929), 111. 2. On the Hellenizing discourses of male homosexuality, see, e.g., Jenkyns (1980), Dellamora (1994), Dowling (1984). Ardis (2001) explores how women responded to Notes to Chapter Four

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the Platonic doctrine of eros cultivated by male intellectuals in Victorian Oxford, and asks: “Does the New Hellenism enable or discredit female intellectuality? Does turn-of-the-century Platonic discourse carve out a cultural space for female homorelationality?” (108). While Ardis draws a negative conclusion from the writing of New Women such as Olive Schreiner and Ethel Arnold, who critiqued the exclusion of women from the homoerotic world of Oxford Hellenism, the proliferation of Ladies’ Greek in many other places did indeed allow women to find a space for “female homorelationality.” 3. Punch, March 28, 1885. The cartoon is reproduced in Hoberman (2002), 499; on women in the British Library, see also Bernstein (2013). A lovely photograph of Robinson (dated 1880) in a studious pose, absorbed in reading a book, is reproduced in Vadillo (2005), 233. 4. A large sheaf of letters written by the young Mary Robinson to John Addington Symonds is collected among the papers of Mme. Darmesteter Duclaux at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. While Symonds preserved her side of this interesting correspondence, his letters to her are mostly lost, with the exception of one letter from Symonds to Robinson dated 1884 (Fonds Anglais 248 f.152–154); a few additional letters from Symonds to Robinson are at Bristol University, and have been edited by Schueller and Peters (1968), vol 2–3. While Robinson’s letters to Vernon Lee have been noted by various scholars including Smith (1998), Colby (2003), Vicinus (2004a),Vadillo (2005a), and Harrington (2014), the correspondence between Robinson and Symonds is a treasure trove for future research; see Newman (2013). 5. On Robinson’s place in the salon culture of literary London, see Vadillo (1999). 6. Translated from a letter to Maurice Barrès in 1922: “Lorsque j’ai connu Browning il avait plus de soixante ans, et j’en avais dix-huit. . . . S’il avait de l’amitié pour moi c’était, je crois, parce que cette frêle jeune fille qui faisait des vers et lisait des poèmes grecs lui rappelait—de bien loin—l’ombre de sa chère Elisabeth, depuis longtemps morte” (Halévy [1959], 74). 7. Correspondance de Mary Robinson, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fonds Anglais 248, folio 31. Letters quoted from Fonds Anglais 248 will be cited in main text, with folio numbers. 8. Robinson, The Crowned Hippolytus, 184. Poems from CH will be hereafter be cited in main text by page number. 9. In his chapter on “The Admission of Women,” Bellot (1929) notes that UCL had a longer history of supporting the higher education of women: as early as 1833 “some were excited to tears” by “the admission of Ladies” to a class in Natural Philosophy, and in 1849 UCL gave assistance to the funding of the Ladies’ College at Bedford Square, but it was not until the decade between 1868 and 1878 that “the college, by granting admission to women, effected the most revolutionary change which has so far occurred in the course of its history” (367–368). In 1878, all lectures were officially opened to both sexes, and the college began to award degrees to women. See also Broderick (1927), 10–16, and Harte (1986), 126–134. 10. Marandon (1967) notes Mabel’s description of Mary at University College: “Sa soeur raconte qu’au début, les jeunes gens et les jeunes filles avaient encore des cours séparés, mais la fusion commençait à s’opérer. Un jour, on annonça que le cours supérieur de

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grec pour jeunes filles allait être incorporé à celui des jeunes gens: on vit alors Mary, toute menue, s’avancer seule pour représenter la catégorie féminine” (22). 11. According to Chambers this tribute was penned by “the most brilliant of all Goodwin’s pupils, Mrs. Craigie,” and is quoted in his centenary address on “Philologists at University College” (39). 12. Quoted from a description of “Mr. Goodwin’s influence in the College,” fondly recalled by a former student and colleague in Faculty, Notes and Materials for the History of UCL (19–22). Goodwin was appointed to the Chair of Latin in 1876, and undertook teaching of Greek in 1879; he became Chair of Greek in 1880 (Bellot [1929], 387). 13. I quote Greek phrases exactly as they appear in Robinson’s correspondence, with the accents as she marked them. The transliterations and translations set off in brackets are my own. 14. From Symonds (1984), 73–74, quoted and analyzed by Blanshard (2000), 104. 15. The notorious treatise by Symonds on the social benefits of love between men was composed in 1866–1868 and rewritten in 1873–1874, then printed privately in a pamphlet of ten copies in 1883 and published posthumously in 1897, as an appendix to Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion. For further discussion on Symonds and the model of ancient Greece, see Holliday (2000); see also Dellamora (1990), 160–162, Dowling (1984) 77–81, Pemble (2000), 11–14, Davis (1999). Davis (2000) points out that “Symonds’s homoerotic aesthetics understood as a whole form of life cannot be reduced to either pole, homoerotic or aesthetic,” but rather must be approached as a reciprocal “relation between homoerotic and aesthetic impressions” (77). 16. Wharton’s 1885 edition of the Sapphic fragments incorporated long passages by Symonds on Sappho quoted from Studies of the Greek Poets, and featured several translations by Symonds. This edition was notable for identifying the addressee of Sappho’s love poetry with feminine pronouns. 17. Robinson (1907), 936. On the relationship between Robinson and Vernon Lee, see Vicinus (2004a, 2004b), Colby (2003), Zorn (2003). On the literary exchange between Robinson and Lee, see Harrington (2014). 18. See Colby (2003), 50–51, and Grosskurth (1981). 19. Zeitlin (1996), 235. Zeitlin summarizes various scholars on the ambiguities of the untouched meadow, and points out it is “the spatial analogue of Hippolytus, who in identifying himself with the meadow and its immortal mistress defines himself as an unworked territory” (232–233). 20. On the figure of the lesbian boy in fin-de-siècle women’s writing, see Vicinus (1999). 21. On the complex appeal of Phaedra to women poets, see Fox (2001). 22. In contrast to Nietzsche’s 1872 attack on Euripides in The Birth of Tragedy, the 1870s were a turning point in England for the revaluation of Euripides, influenced in part by publication of two translations by Robert Browning, as Symonds notes in his chapter, “Greek Tragedy and Euripides” (243). Symonds (1873) sought to defend Euripides from German critics in particular: “It would be a delightful task to attempt to do him justice in the teeth of a malevolent generation of critics, led by Schlegel and Müller, who do not understand him” (223). On the nineteenth-century damnatio of Euripides see Behler (1986), Henrichs (1986), Michelini (1987).

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23. The Academy, July 20, 1878, p. 53. 24. The Spectator, October 26, 1878, p. 1343. 25. The Saturday Review, January 4, 1879, 21. 26. Quoted by Vadillo (2005a) from a personal letter addressed by Lee to Robinson in 1886. 27. The Athenaeum, No. 2801, July 2, 1881. 28. On Robinson as a Victorian poet on the verge of “modernity,” see DeMoor (1995), Ely (2000), Vadillo (2005a). 29. For further analysis of Robinson’s meters in relation to Victorian experiments with classical meters, see Glaser (2011). He notes the intrusion of alternate triple feet into iambic scheme, to create evocation of Euripidean choral meter that approximates ballad meter: “What makes these lines ‘Greek’ is not merely the choriambic element intruding into an iambic meter but the infusion of a native, scannable English pattern into an ‘abstract’ Greek pattern” (208). 30. H.D. (1982), 32. 31. Gregory (1997), 182. For other critics on H.D.’s Euripides, see Swann (1962), Quinn (1967), Moyer (1997), Collecott (1999), Fox (2001). 32. See “Artemis Prologizes” by Robert Browning, “Phaedra” by Swinburne, “Hippolytus Veiled” by Pater. 33. E.g., Julia Ward Howe’s Hippolytus and editions of Hippolytus for girls at school, and college productions; see also Gilbert Murray’s 1902 translation of Hippolytus, performed in London in 1904 with set design by Jane Harrison. 34. Quoted by Barbara Guest (1984) from H.D.’s correspondence with Gemma d’Auria, her former schoolmate from the Friends’ School in Philadelphia (p. 20). 35. H.D. (1915), 171. 36. Flint (1915), 71. 37. Aldington (June 1, 1914), 202–203. 38. Aldington (September 15, 1914), 352. 39. The Poets’ Translation Series was first advertised in The Egoist 2.18 (August 2, 1915), 131. 40. Letter from Aldington to H.D., dated December 17, 1918. Zilboorg (1992), 172–173. 41. Some of H.D.’s translations from Hippolytus appeared in The Dial, and they were reprinted with additional passages in “Choruses from Iphigeneia in Aulis and the Hippolytus of Euripides” for The Poets’ Translation Series (1919). The sequence was included in H.D.’s Collected Poems (1925), and is reprinted in Martz (1983), 85–93. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from H.D.’s poetry refer to page numbers in the 1983 edition (CP). 42. H.D. primarily worked from the Greek text edited by Wilhelm Dinsdorf; in her personal copies of Dinsdorf ’s Euripides Tragoediae (Oxford, 1832–1840) and Euripides Opera Omnia (Oxford, 1871–1873), she translated Greek words in the margins and marked the choruses in particular. She also made some marks in Theodore Buckley’s prose translation of Hippolytus (1871) and in Arthur Way’s Greek-English edition of Hippolytus (1912–1916). See Gregory (2010). 43. H.D. (1982), 24. 44. From “Notes on Euripides, Pausanias, and Greek Lyric Poets.” Unpublished manuscript in the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Begun in 1920, H.D.’s “notes” are described as “lyrical meditations after the style of Pater” by Gregory (1997), who 260

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records H.D.’s interest in collecting these essays for publication (67; 266–267); Collecott (1999) reads them in relation to Pater’s essays in Greek Studies (107–113). See also Moyer (1997). 45. Eliot (1916), 102–103. 46. Eliot (1919). 47. Eliot (1920), 49–50. 48. H.D. letter to Thomas Burnett Swann, quoted by Swann (1962), 10. 49. I quote from the Translator’s Preface in Murray (1904b). The translation was first published in 1902, and often reprinted. On Murray’s popularity as a translator of Euripides, see, e.g., Burian (2000), and Ackerman (1986). 50. Murray (1902), 6. 51. Murray (1913); Gregory notes that this book was in H.D.’s library (2010), 273. 52. H.D. (1981), 72. This “novel” was written around 1927 and published posthumously. 53. H.D. (1987–1988), 73. 54. Gregory notes that “H.D.’s preoccupation with the myth of Hippolytus spans nearly the whole of her early career, beginning in 1917, when she was translating portions of Euripides’ Hippolytus (finally published in 1919), and continuing through the 1920s with the publication in Hymen (1921) of four poems on the Hippolytus theme and with the subsequent publication of in 1924 through 1926 of other related lyrics as well as portions of the play in progress” (134). The four poems in Hymen are “Hippolytus Temporizes,” “Phaedra,” “She Contrasts with Herself Hippolyta,” and “She Rebukes Hippolyta”; in addition, H.D. used portions from “Leucadian Artemis” (1924) and “Songs from Cyprus” (1925) in Hippolytus Temporizes. See Gregory (1990), 135. 55. The androgyny of H.D.’s Hippolytus has been read in literary terms, in relation to the Hellenized homoeroticism of Swinburne and Pater, and in biographical terms, in terms of her bisexuality, her “matrisexuality,” and various erotic triangles in her personal relationships; see Lyon (1991), Collecott (1999), Laity (1996), Fox (2001), and Walsh (1927; revised edition 1985), Afterword; I quote the text from the revised edition. 56. Swann (1962), 141–143. 57. H.D. (1926).

Chapter Five. Dancing Greek Letters 1. Raitt (2000), 215. On Mary Olivier as a reworking of Victorian women novelists, and George Eliot in particular, see Hurst (2006), 193–198, and also Lyn Pykett (2000), 114. 2. “They stood on the shelf in Mark’s bedroom, above his writing table. . . . Besides the little shabby Oxford Homers there were an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, two volumes of Aristophanes, clean and new, three volumes of Euripides and a Greek Testament. On the table a well-preserved Greek Anthology” (125–126). The books on this shelf were probably ones that Sinclair had read herself; see Boll (1973), 29. 3. On Mary Olivier and HERmione as experimental autobiographies, see Raitt (2000), 215–216. 4. Sinclair (1915), 88. 5. In “Torque: The New Kinesthetic of the Twentieth Century,” Hillel Schwartz describes various examples of modern kinesthesia, including the transition from Delsartean to Dalcrozian methods for presenting the body in motion (1992), 71 ff. Notes to Chapter Five

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6. On Lady Emma Hamilton and others “in Bacchante,” see chapter 5 in Pointon (1997). 7. Ruskin, quoted in Kestner (1989), 278. Kestner discusses other Alma-Tadema canvases depicting Bacchantes in other poses as well: in “There He Is!” (1875), a woman dressed in ivy and animal skins leans forward to catch a glimpse of Dionysos; in “After the Dance” (1877) a maenad exhausted from her revels lies asleep; in “The Torch Dance” (1881) a maenad is dancing in a wild frenzy; in “The Women of Amphissa” (1887) maenads are sprawled on marble slabs; in “A Dedication to Bacchus” (1889) maenads dance while a girl is initiated into the cult of Dionysus; in “A Bacchante” (1907) maenads are playing cymbals and pipes (276–279, 309–310). 8. On the maenad as a revolutionary figure, transplanted from France to England and domesticated in mid-century debates about English women, see Shires (1992), 147–65. 9. See Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Wild Woman as Social Insurgent” (1891), “The Partisans of the Wild Women (1892), and “Nearing the Rapids” (1894). On late Victorian discourses about the New Woman, see Ledger (1995). 10. Smith-Rosenberg (1985), 297. 11. Pater (1895), 53. Although Pater wrote “The Bacchanals of Euripides” in 1878, it was not published until 1889 in Macmillan’s Magazine; subsequently it was reprinted as the preface to Robert Y. Tyrrell’s Bacchae (1892) and collected for posthumous publication in Greek Studies (1895). Pater’s other essay on Dionysus was also written in the 1870s. 12. On the Dionysus essays of Pater and his queer kinship with female aestheticism, see Prins (1999). 13. Sturge Moore (1933), 120. 14. Smith (1937), 90–91. 15. For more detailed readings of Callirrhoë, see Prins (1999), Olverson (2010), Bickle (2010), Eastham (2011). For further discussion on the Dionysiac aestheticism of Michael Field, see Evangelista (2009). 16. A. Mary F. Robinson, Review of Callirrhoë, Fair Rosamund in Academy 25 (June 7, 1884), 395–396. Among the women converted to Pater’s Dionysiac aestheticism was Robinson’s partner Vernon Lee (pseudonym for Violet Paget). As “Pater’s Maenad,” she was member of his literary circle in Oxford (cite biography), and she dedicated her essays in Euphorion (1884) to Pater, as well as her story “Dionysus in the Euganean Hills” (1920). See Maxwell (1997). 17. Jane Harrison (1890), 285. On this passage in Harrison, see also Peters (2008). 18. Harrison (1925), 46. 19. Quoted in Robinson (2002), 48. 20. For an excellent account of Harrison’s aestheticism during the 1880s, also in relation to Pater’s essays on Greek art, see Evangelista (2011). 21. For a reassessment of Harrison’s place within the history of classical scholarship and the influence of her work on current theories of ritual and myth, see, e.g., Ackerman (1972), Payne (1978), Henrichs (1984), Versnel (1990b), Schlesier (1990). On Harrison’s life and work, see, e.g., Stewart (1959), Peacock (1988), Lloyd-Jones (1996), Arlen (1996), Beard (2000), Robinson (2002), Fiske (2008). On Harrison’s influence within modernist classicisms, see, e.g., Shattuck (1987), Carpentier (1998), Schlesier (1991), K. J. Phillips (1991), Kolocotroni (2005), Koulouris (2011), Preston (2011), Mills (2014). 22. Ackerman (1972, 221–222) notes that Harrison’s early writing is “evocative of Pater and the esthetic movement,” and that the “desire to see a pattern” is an aesthetic urge 262

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that persists throughout all her work. However, Ackerman finally interprets Harrison’s turn to the study of religion as a turn away from her earlier aestheticism (223), as does Peacock (1988) who argues that Harrison “actually changed her style” after being criticized for too much aestheticism in her work (69). 23. Pater (1889), 7. 24. Harrison (1903), 452. 25. Harrison (1894), 165. 26. Quoted by Lloyd-Jones (1996), 39. 27. Gardner’s searing criticism of Harrison is quoted in Robinson (2002), 196. 28. Pater (1980), xix–xx. 29. Robinson (2002), 132–133. Robinson devotes a chapter to the letters between Harrison and Murray, especially during the period of 1900–1903 when his work on the Bacchae influenced her work on Prolegomena, perhaps too much so, as Harrison teased Murray: “It’s rather dreadful, the whole centre of gravity of the book has shifted. It began as a treatise on Keres with a supplementary notice on Dionysus. It is ending as a screed on Dionyus with an introductory talk about Keres. Whose fault is that? Never, never again will I ask you to lecture when I am writing a book, a nice sound one too, it was, till last autumn” (quoted by Ackerman). However, Harrison’s letters also record her influence on Murray’s book, as she tended to correct his translations to fit her theories. 30. Staten (1990), 118. Nietzsche’s lack of interest in maenadism is noted as well by Silk and Stern (1981), 173–174. 31. Harrison (1912), xv. 32. Quoted by Vicinus (1985), 155. 33. On Harrison’s “direct method” of teaching Greek, Robinson (2002),188-189 quotes a letter to Murray from Harrison as well as a student’s response. For more discussion of Harrison’s pedagogy, see Mills (2014), 45-47. 34. Quoted by Robinson (2002), 80. 35. Quoted by Peacock (1988), 62. 36. Phillips (1979), 87. 37. Robinson (2002), 144. 38. N. M. Haldane, “Awakening of the Bacchae,” in Oxford Poetry 1915, ed. G.D.H. Cole and T. W. Earp (Oxford: Blackwell, 1915), 22. The poem is cited by Hurst (2006) to suggest “the Bacchae of this poem are not savage or destructive” (201) and by Olverson (2010b) to suggest, by the early twentieth century, “the transgressive power of Dionysus had been neutralized and his Maenads desexualized and pacified” (24). But the poem could be read as a call to action as well. 39. Dobkin (1979), 122. On the ongoing relationship between Thomas and Gildersleeve, see Horowitz (1999), 74, 98, and also Briggs (2000). 40. “Requirements for Admission,” Bryn Mawr College Program 1884, 1–2.

Postface: Greek Letters in the Archive 1. Steedman (2001), 69. 2. On the transformation of Meta Glass into president of Sweet Briar College, see Stohlman (1956). She also served as national president of the American Association of University Women and president of the American Association of Colleges. Notes to Postface

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3. The edition used by Meta Glass was The Antigone of Sophocles, with introduction, notes, and appendix by Milton W. Humphreys (New York: American Book Company, 1906). Andrea Eis found this book, inscribed with the name of Meta Glass, in a private library in Athens, along with other Greek and Latin books that belonged to her. 4. Steiner (1984), Honig (2013), Mee and Foley (2011). 5. See, e.g., Molstad (1970); Jenkyns (1980), 112–132; Joseph (1981); chapter 3 in Falk (1992); McClure (1993); Easterling (1994); Hurst (2006), 170–183; Fiske (2008), 112–148, and Fiske (2015). 6. George Eliot, “The Antigone and Its Moral,” Leader 7 (March 29, 1856), reprinted in Selected Essays, Poems and other Writing, ed. A. S. Byatt (1990). 7. See Haight (1968), 113. 8. “Eliot’s Novels,” Quarterly Review 108 (1860): 471. 9. Winterer (2001), 70, 78. 10. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “The Sacrifice of Antigone” (1891), cited by Winterer (2001), 83. 11. Winterer (2007), 203. 12. Watson and Gregory (2005), 9. 13. On Anne Cooke’s arrival at Spelman, see Read (1961), 218–221. In applying for the position, Cooke emphasized that her preparation for teaching included Shakespearean and modern drama, “The Classics in Translation as well as “Interpretative Reading,” and “Dramatic Expression” (Spelman College Archive, Letter from Anne Cooke to Florence Read, 1927). In 1931 she organized the University Players, drawing from students at Spelman, Morehouse, and Atlanta University. On the importance of Cooke in the history of African American educational theater, see Perkins (1996), Hill and Hatch (2003), 259–261. 14. The Spelman Messenger (February 1933), 27. 15. The Campus Mirror (March 15, 1933), 33. 16. The Spelman Messenger (February 1933), 26. 17. The editor of Theatre Arts Monthly wrote to Florence Read, fourth president of Spelman College: “I am sorry that even these photographs of Antigone do not seem to be quite good enough.” Read passed along this reply to Anne Cooke with the wry comment: “It is too bad, isn’t it, that the picture didn’t quite pass muster? We must send them something next year that will achieve publication.” A month later, Read reported that Theatre Arts Monthly had at least printed a brief announcement: “Seniors of the college composed a new musical score for the Antigone of Sophocles when it was produced by the University Players of Atlanta University, Spelman and Morehouse Colleges under the directions of Anna [sic] M. Cooke” (Spelman College Archive, Letters from Florence Read to Anne Cooke dated June 16, 1933 and July 10, 1933). 18. Anne Cooke (1936), 58 begins her article with the headline: “Can the American Negro Theatre learn anything from the Moscow Art Theatre? The Director of Dramatics at Spelman Colleges believes that it can.” 19. The Spelman Messenger (Fall/Winter 2007–2008), 20.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations. Aeschylus: Browning on, 70; feminist reading of, 41, 93; language of, 37–38, 71–72; various translations of, 38, 42– 43, 45–46, 83; Woolf on, 12, 35–38, 53. See also individual tragedies by title aestheticism, 211, 218, 262n22 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), xiii, 23, 156, 219, 250n17, 250n30; Coleridge’s translation of, 8–11, 9; performances of, 39, 47–50, 48; R. Browning’s translation of, 38, 85–86, 157; Woolf on, 31, 35–38 Aldington, Richard, 181–84, 204 Allen, Maud, 206 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 262n7; “Autumn: A Vintage Festival,” 206–7 alphabet. See letters, Greek amateurs, female scholars as, xiii, 8, 19, 39, 41–42, 93, 107, 112, 116 American Academy of Dramatic Arts, 150 Anglin, Margaret, 150–51 Antigone, 29, 236–37 Antigone (Sophocles), 234–42, 234, 235, 241, 244 Appleton, William Hyde, 22 Archer-Hind, Richard Darce, 23 archives, xii, xv–xvi, 32, 150, 233, 236, 242, 244 Ardis, Ann, 257n2 Aristophanes, 160; The Birds, 177–78 Aristotle, 26, 144 Arnold, Ethel, 258n2 Arnold, Matthew, 13, 24, 30 Artemis, 155, 164–67, 189–90, 192–99 Aryanism, 25 Aspasia, 25 Associated Charities of Boston, 254n56

Atè (madness), 75 Athena, 40–41 The Bacchae (Euripides), xiii; chorus of, 204–5; Harrison on, 212–13, 216; H.D.’s translation of, 204–5; kinesthetic qualities of, 202–3, 206, 214, 227, 229; Murray’s translation of, 213–14, 216–17; production of, 33; reception of, 206; Sikelianos’s productions of, 224–27, 224–26, 228–31 Bacon, Helen, 106–7 barbarian language, 37, 45, 53–54 Barnard College, 23, 138 Barney, Natalie, 256n86 Beard, Mary, 18–19 Bedford College for Women, 92 Beerbohm, Max, 47, 251n35 Bell, Vanessa, 51 Bennett, Arnold, 51 Benson, E. F., The Babe, BA, 47 Blackie, John Stuart, 88 Blodgett, Benjamin, 142 Blomfield, Charles James, 35, 65, 73–74 Booth, Alison, 27 Boston University, 22, 29 Bothe, Friedrich Heinrich, 65 Bourlos, George, 255n80 Bowra, C. M., 110 Boyd, Hugh Stuart, 4, 63–66, 68, 70, 72–75, 253n19 Bradley, Katherine, 89, 208–9 British Library, 153-4, 160, 181 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (E.B.B.), 1–7, 233; Aurora Leigh, 6–7, 80, 81–83, 203; “Biographical Sketch,” 4; diary of, 64–65, 252n16; and Electra, 119–20;

289

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (continued) Fields and, 255n67; “First Greek Ode,” xx, 1–4; “Glimpses into My Own Life and Literary Character,” 3, 62; Greek studies undertaken by, 3–5, 62–65, 77; personal life of, 63–64, 79–80, 89–90; poems accompanying Prometheus Bound, 76, 80; Prometheus Bound translation by, 31–32, 59–62, 65–84, 90–91, 252n8; Robinson and, 155–57; successors of, 105, 152; “The Tempest: A Fragment,” 76 Browning, Robert: Agamemnon translation by, 38, 85–86, 157; E.B.B. and, 79–81, 89–90, 119; Fields and, 105; Robinson and, 46, 153, 156; Swanwick and, 89–90; translations of Euripides by, 259n22 Bryn Mawr College, 24, 33, 106, 111, 138, 190, 218–27, 233 Bryn Mawr School for Girls, 106 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 59 Cambridge Greek Play, 39, 41, 47–49, 51, 130 Cambridge Ritualists, 19 Cambridge University, 13–24, 39, 42, 46, 92, 138, 237 Carson, Anne, xv, 121 Case, Janet, 31, 32, 35, 40–41, 46, 61, 92–95, 122–24, 123, 127, 129–31, 134, 137, 145, 151, 233; “Women in the Plays of Aeschylus,” 41 Cassandra, 31, 37–38, 45–51, 48, 53–56 Cassandra, 26 Cather, Willa, 97 Cheltenham College, 204 choreography. See dancing and choreography chorus: from Antigone, 240; from Bacchae, 204–5; from Electra, 124–26, 125, 137, 144, 145, 147, 148; from Hippolytus, 172–74; Sikelianos and, 223; women’s identification with, 30–31 classical literacy: of African Americans, 240; in America, 104–5; E.B.B. and, 290

81–82; female, xiii, xiv, 25, 32, 84, 116, 187; Fields and, 103; gendering of, 114–15; at Girton College, 127–29; Hamilton and, 108; for the masses, 93; scholarship on women’s, xii; theatrical performances as exercise in, 124–27, 125, 137, 140; translation of Prometheus Bound as performance of, 32, 57, 59, 87; for women in twentieth century, 112 classical reception, 26, 33–34, 125, 243-44 Clytemnestra, 41, 157 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10 Coleridge, Sara, 8–11, 83; “First Chorus in ‘The Agamemnon’,” 9 Coles, Robert, 64 Collecott, Diana, 181 Columbia University, 138 Cooke, Anne M., 240–41, 264n13 Cooper, Anna Julia, 25–26, 249n36 Cooper, Edith, 208–9 Cornford, Francis, 217 Crace, J. F., 47–48, 48, 50 cribs, 35–37, 42, 78, 94 cylix paintings, 209–10, 210, 214–15, 215, 224, 224 Dalgarno, Emily, 55 “Dance of Maenads (Berlin Museum),” 209–10, 210 dancing and choreography: for Antigone, 240–42; for Electra, 148, 150; Harrison on, 209–18; maenads and, 206; Sikelianos and, 223–27, 228, 229. See also Delsartean movement Davies, Emily, 13 Davis, Margaret Llewelyn, 137 decadent aesthetics, 172, 177, 181 Delphi, 96, 111–13, 223 Delsarte, François, 143 Delsartean movement, 32, 143, 145, 148, 151, 206, 225, 256n86 democracy, 110, 255n80 Dene, Dorothy, 46 De Quincey, Thomas, 29 Dinsdorf, Wilhelm, 260n42 Index

Dionysianism, 33, 209, 214, 216–18 Dionysus, 206–18 Dodds, E. R., 206 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 33, 154–55, 180–201, 204, 208; Bacchae translation by, 204–5; Choruses from the Hippolytus of Euripides, 33, 155; HERmione, 190–92, 204; “Hippolytus Temporizes,” 192–93; Hippolytus Temporizes, 33, 155, 192–200; Hippolytus translation by, 155, 184–90, 260n42, 261n54; Hymen, 155, 204, 261n54; and Imagism, 182–83, 187, 204; Red Roses for Bronze, 204 Dryden, John, 66 Duncan, Isadora, 206, 229, 256n86 Duncan, Raymond, 206 E.B.B. See Browning, Elizabeth Barrett education. See women’s education Egerton, W. le B., 48, 50 The Egoist (journal), 182, 183, 188, 204 Eis, Andrea: Glass’s copy of Antigone, 234, 234, 244–45, 244, 264n3; My pain, 245, 245; Where do the depths come in? 235–36, 235 Electra (character), 117–23, 133–34 Electra (Sophocles), xiii, 116–51; choreography for, 148, 150; chorus of, 124–26, 125, 137, 144, 145, 147, 148; female characters of, 117, 137; gender in, 134–36; at Girton College, 123, 124–38, 133, 135, 136, 144, 150–51; interpretations of, 117; mourning in, 117–20, 134–36; music for, 142, 142; performances of, 32, 116–17, 122–51; popularity of, 150; at Smith College, 140–50, 141, 142, 144–47, 149 Electra Album, 148, 150 Eliot, George, 26, 188, 237–38 Eliot, T. S., 188 Eros, 160, 175, 184–86, 198, 200, 237–38, 240 The Eumenides (Aeschylus), 41, 46 Euripides, 138; interpretations of, 172, 190, 259n22; lyrical qualities of, 171–72, Index

178, 181; reception of, 32–33, 155. See also individual tragedies by title Evangelista, Stefano, xii, 262n15, 262n20 Faucit, Helen, 29 feminism, xii–xiii, 41, 93, 162, 207, 211, 216 Field, Michael (pen name of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Callirrhoë, 208–9 Fields, Annie Adams, 32, 61, 96–106, 233, 254n56; Asphodel, 104; Authors and Friends, 97; Browning and, 255n67; Diary 13, 97, 98; “The Flight of Io,” 99, 100, 101–3; “The Last Contest of Aeschylus,” 103–5; Memories of a Hostess, 97; Under the Olive, 103–5 Fields, James, 96 Fiske, Shanyn, xii, 262n21 Flaxman, John, 83, 89; Illustration of Io, 91 Foley, Helene, 116, 150 Forman, H. Buxton, 83–84 Foster, Clare, 117 Fowler, Rowena, 55 free verse, 183, 185, 204 The Freewoman (journal), 182 Freud, Sigmund, 64, 120, 236 Fuller, Margaret, 27–28 Gardner, Percy, 213 Garrett, Mary Elizabeth, 106 gender: classical literacy and, 114–15; Electra and, 134–36; politics of Greek and, 14, 18, 41, 59; translation and, 77–78, 84, 88, 110 Gilbert, Sandra, xii Gildersleeve, Basil Lanneau, 219 Girton College, xiii, 13–16, 32, 40, 46, 92, 122–39, 144, 150–51, 237 Girton Girl, 13, 92-93, 128, 152, 237-38, 248n16 Girton Review (magazine), 128, 130–33, 138–39 Gladstone, William, 89 Glass, Meta, 233–36, 234, 244–45, 244, 263n2, 264n3 291

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, “Prometheus. Dramatisches Fragment,” 99 Goldhill, Simon, 13–14, 42 Gollin, Rita, 97 Goodwin, Alfred, 157–59, 180 Gosse, Edmund, 159 grammar, 23, 62 Greece, 96, 106, 110–14, 255n80 Greek: approaches to, 7–8; at Cambridge University, 13–24; as dead language, xi, xiii, 3–5, 7–8, 17, 18, 23, 28, 32, 36–37, 39, 44, 53, 55, 69, 114, 120, 188, 233, 244; English in relation to, 11, 35–38, 45, 49–53, 69, 94; fascination with/desire for, xi, 3–4, 7–8, 14, 15–16, 19, 35, 40, 41–44, 62, 95–96, 106, 122, 153, 219–20, 222, 232, 237; gender politics of, 14, 18, 41, 59; as idea, 11, 12; knowing, 13–14, 45, 49; not knowing, 12, 13, 14, 20, 44–45, 53; reasons for studying, xi, xiii, 5–6; women’s study of, 12–26. See also letters, Greek Gregory, Eileen, 181–82 Gubar, Susan, xii Hall, Edith, 116, 137 Hallett, Judith, 110 Hamilton, Edith, 32, 61, 96, 106–12, 233, 255n80; The Greek Way, 110; Prometheus Bound translation by, 108–11; “On Translating,” 109–10 Hamilton, Emma, 143, 206 Hardwick, Lorna, 59, 84 Harris, Susan, 97 Harrison, Jane Ellen, xi, xii, 17, 20, 55, 233, 234; and aestheticism, 211, 262n22; Alpha and Omega, 217; classical studies undertaken by, 16, 43–44; Introductory Studies in Greek Art, 211; on maenads and Dionysus, 33, 209–18, 224; Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 213–14, 263n29; as public face of Ladies’ Greek, 16–19; Reminiscences of a Student’s Life, 43; as teacher, 18, 217–18; Themis, 215 292

Harvard University, 22, 248n26 H.D. See Doolittle, Hilda Headlam, Walter, 42, 46 Hegel, G.W.F., 236, 237 Helios, 197–99 Hellenism, 13–14, 25, 33, 181, 211, 219, 257n2. See also New Hellenism Herodotus, 15 Higginson, T.W., 22, 24 Hipparchia, 200 Hippolyta, 194 Hippolytus, 154–55, 163–68, 181, 185, 189–90, 192, 194–200, 261n54 Hippolytus (Euripides), xiii; chorus of, 172–74; eroticism of, 154–55; H.D.’s translation of, 155, 184–90, 260n42, 261n54; reception of, 33, 181; Robinson’s translation of, 153–56, 159, 165–80, 187; Symonds on, 163–80 Hirst, Gertrude, 138–39 Hogarth Press, 43 Holliday, Henry, 130 homosexuality and homoeroticism, 145, 154, 160–65, 167, 207, 237–38, 257n2, 259n15, 261n55 Honig, Bonnie, 236 Howard Collegiate Institute, 23 Hughes, Mary Vivian, 46 Hurst, Isobel, xii, 59, 253n28, 261n1 Hyperides, 196–97 identification: with chorus, 30–31; with Greek letters, xiii, 3, 7, 20, 63–64, 114, 232; with maenads, 33; with tragic heroines, 26–30, 46. See also subjectivity Imagism, 182–83, 187, 204 Io, 57–59, 62, 68, 72–76, 79–81, 90, 93–94, 99, 101–3, 107–9, 112–14, 115 Iphigeneia in Aulis (Euripides), 182, 184 Jebb, Caroline, 133 Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, 117, 121, 134 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 97, 106 Jews, 20 Index

Johnson, Alice Robbins, 145–47 Johnson, Samuel, 15 Keats, John, 222; “On the Sonnet,” 193 Kelly, Mary, 24–25 Kennedy, Robert F., 110 kinesthesia, 33, 202–3, 206, 214, 216, 227, 229 King’s College, 39, 92 Kirstein, Lincoln, 227, 229 Koulouris, Theodore, xii, 250n24 Kupris, 185 Ladies’ Greek: African-American, 242; in America, 23, 95–96; American embodiment of, 110; Bryn Mawr College and, 219–27; Cambridge University and, 13–24; circulation of, 9, 23, 117; culture of, 12, 26, 150; features of, 7–8, 12, 13, 18, 41–42; gender politics of, 14, 18; H.D. and, 155; knowing/not knowing ambiguity of, 12, 20; lady-translators, 83–95; and maenads, 202; marginal character of, 8, 13, 14, 18–19, 30, 62, 112; outside of university settings, 24–25; performance of, xiii–xv, 7–8, 10–12, 18, 24, 26, 34, 127, 233, 239; and Prometheus Bound, 59, 62; public face of, 16–18; recommendations for study of, 242–45; Robinson and, 154, 157, 173; Sikelianos and, 227; subjectivity and, 14, 20, 25; theatrical performances and, 124–51, 125; Woolf and, 41–43 lady-translators, xiii, 83–95 Laity, Cassandra, 181 language, materiality of, 53, 55 Lantern Night, 220–21 Lathbury, Millington, 18 Lee, Hermione, 56 Lee, Vernon (pen name of Violet Paget), 154, 162–63, 167, 176–77, 181, 262n16 Leighton, Angela, 76 Leighton, Frederic, Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon, 118–19, 118

Leontis, Artemis, 58, 114, 222 letters, Greek: dramatic performance and, 48, 58; identification with, xiii, 3, 7, 20, 63–64, 114, 232; Io and, 57–59, 62; literality of, xiii, 7, 11, 12, 31, 38, 56, 235; Prometheus’s introduction of, 57–58 Levy, Amy, 20–21, 248n22; “Lallie: A Cambridge Sketch,” 21; “Reading,” 21; Sketch, 20, 21 Library of the World’s Best Literature, Ancient and Modern (anthology), 179 literacy, 25, 57–59, 84, 87, 129, 239 Little-Go examination, 13, 126, 127 Loeb Classical Library, 52–53 Loeffelholz, Mary, 103 London School Board, 87, 92 London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, 16 Longfellow, Alice, 137–38 Loraux, Nicole, 120 Lynch, Hannah, 179 Lynton, Eliza Lynn, 207 Macintosh, Fiona, 116, 206 “Maenad,” 215 maenads: in The Bacchae, 204–5; Harrison and, 33, 209–18, 224; identification with, 33, 212; illustrations of, 210, 215, 224; Pater on, 207–9; significance of, for early twentieth-century women, 202, 206, 224; significance of, for Victorian women, 206–9; in Sikelianos’s productions of The Bacchae, 225–27, 229; women’s colleges and, 218–32 Magill, Edward, 22 Magill, Helen, 21–24, 248n25, 248n26; “The Greek Drama,” 29–30, 30 Maxwell, Catherine, 262n16 materiality of language, 53, 55 Medwin, Thomas, 77 melancholia, 117–18 Mendelssohn, Felix, 142 meter: in The Bacchae, 206; H.D. and, 182–87, 189–201; recitation of, xv, 46,

Index 293

meter (continued) 50, 126, 217; Robinson and, 173–80, 260n29 Mill, John Stuart, 92; The Subjection of Women, 26 Mitchell, Mary W., 95 Mitchison, Naomi, “Awakening of the Bacchae,” 218 Morshead, E.D.A., 85 mourning, 117–20, 134–36 Murray, Gilbert, 18–19, 188–90, 213–14, 215–17, 222, 263n29 music, 142, 142, 176–80, 225–27 Myers, Fred, 169–70 The New Freewoman (journal), 182 New Hellenism, 153 Newnham College, 16, 18, 20–22, 33, 43, 127, 137, 138, 152, 212 Newton, Charles, 130 New Woman, 33, 152–54, 181, 202, 207 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 215, 259n22; The Birth of Tragedy, 33, 206, 210, 222 Nightingale, Florence, 26 Oberlin College, 25 Oedipus, 236 Olverson, Tracy, xii, 262n15 Oresteia (Aeschylus), 39, 49–51, 88 originality, 69. See also translation: original in relation to Oxford University, 39 Paley, F. A., 86 Pall Mall Gazette (newspaper), 16–18, 17 Palmer, Eva. See Sikelianos, Eva Palmer Pan-African Conference, 26 “Papirius and His Mother” (statue), 145, 146 Pater, Clara, 40 Pater, Walter, 33, 40, 177, 181, 188, 207– 15, 218, 262n16; “The Bacchanals of Euripides,” 207–9, 262n11 Payne, Robert, 114 performance. See theatrical performances 294

Peterson, Linda, 5–6 Phaedra, 154, 163, 168–71, 174–75, 192, 194, 199–200 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, “The Sacrifice of Antigone,” 239 philology, 7–8, 18, 22, 42, 44, 93, 158, 219 Plato, 158, 161, 222 Platonic love, 160–61 Plutarch, 214 The Poet’s Translation Series (pamphlets), 183–84 Porson, Richard, 4 Postgate, J. P., 129 Pound, Ezra, 181, 182, 183, 190, 204; “The Return,” 193 Price, Uvedale, 4 Princeton University, 23 Prometheus, 57–61, 67–68, 70, 72, 79, 90, 101–2, 107 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), xiii, 57–115; advertisement for, 113; in America, 95–115; the body in, 67; E.B.B.’s translation of, 31–32, 59–62, 65–84, 252n8; Hamilton’s translation of, 108–11; liberation as theme in, 93, 111; literacy as theme in, 57–59; and literal translation, 31, 57, 61, 66, 69, 76–81, 84–86, 94, 109–10; mobility as theme in, 57–58, 62; productions of, 32, 111–14, 113, 115, 223; rebellion as theme in, 90; subjection/suffering as theme in, 31, 59, 61–62, 67–68, 70–76, 90; various translations of, 32, 59, 61, 69, 83–95 prosopography, 27 Punch (magazine), 152–53, 154, 237 Putnam, Emily James Smith, 138 Queen’s College, 92 Radcliffe College, 137, 254n56 Raitt, Suzanne, 203 Ramsay, Agnata, 14–16, 15, 130 Randolph-Macon Women’s College, 233–34 Reynolds, Matthew, 86 Index

Rhythmics, 206 Robertson, Eric, 156 Robinson, Agnes Mary Francis, 33, 46, 153–63, 154, 209, 233; “An Address to the Nightingale,” 177–78; classical studies undertaken by, 156–59, 180; The Crowned Hippolytus, 33, 153–54, 166, 177–79; and E.B.B., 155–57; feminism of, 162; and Greek poetry, 159–60; A Handful of Honeysuckle, 153, 161, 172–73; Hippolytus translation by, 153–56, 159, 165–80, 187; “During Music,” 177; “A Passion of Music,” 177; reception of poetry of, 172–73, 178–80; Symonds’s correspondence with, 153–54, 159–80, 174; “Two Sisters,” 157 Robinson, Mabel, 157, 168 Rohde, Erwin, Psyche, 212 Roman, Judith, 97 Romanticism, 59 Russell, Bertrand, 213 Sackville-West, Vita, 152–53 Sappho, 25, 162 Sargent, Henry, 142 Sargent, Mary, 130 Schlegel, Friedrich, 29 Schreiner, Olive, 258n2 Sellers, Eugenie, 46 Shakespeare, William, 68 Shattuck, Sandra, 43 Shawn, Ted, 256n86 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 43, 59; “Ode to the West Wind,” 119 Sheppard, J. T., 39, 49–51 Sibree, John, 237 Sikelianos, Angelos, 96, 111 Sikelianos, Eva Palmer, 32, 33, 61, 96, 111, 113, 115, 221–27, 224–26, 228, 229, 230–31, 255n85, 256n86; Upward Panic, 222 Sinclair, May, 206; Mary Olivier, 202–4 Smith, Bonnie, 19 Smith, Emily, 23 Smith, Sophia, 139 Index

Smith College, xiii, 32, 123, 139–50, 227, 229, 230–31 social activism, 92, 93, 254n56 Somerville College, 92 Sophocles, 29–30, 68. See also individual tragedies by title Spelman College, 239–42 Spofford, Harriett Prescott, 105 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 25 Stark, Susanne, 84 Staten, Henry, 215 statue posing, 143 St Denis, Ruth, 256n86 Stebbins, Genevieve, Delsarte System of Expression, 143, 148 Stedman, E. C., 155–56 Steedman, Carolyn, 233 Stein, Gertrude, 219 Steiner, Deborah, 58–59 Steiner, George, 236 Stephen, J. K., 49 Stephen, Thoby, 39 “Story of Orestes,” 46 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 105 Stray, Christopher, 239 “St. Valentine’s Day at Girton” (cartoon), 237–38, 238 subjectivity: Electra and, 137; Greek scholarship and, 14, 20, 25. See also identification sublime, 71–72, 76 Swann, Thomas Burnett, 199 Swanwick, Anna, 24–25, 32, 61, 83, 84, 86, 87–92; The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, As Performed at Cambridge November 16–21, 1900, With the Verse Translation by Anna Swanwick, 49 Swarthmore College, 22 Sweet Briar College, 234 Swinburne, Algernon, 153, 181, 182, 188, 190–92, 200; Atalanta in Calydon, 98, 190–91 Symonds, John Addington, 33, 153–54, 159–80, 259n15, 259n22; “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” 177; 295

Symonds, John Addington (continued) Studies of the Greek Poets, 163–65, 167, 171, 181 The Tale of Troy, 46 Temple Dramatist Series, 93 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, The Princess, 9–10 theatrical performances: The Bacchae at Bryn Mawr and Smith colleges, 223–31; classical literacy demonstrated by, 124–27, 125, 136–37, 140; of Electra, 116–17, 122–51; Electra at Girton College, 124–38, 150–51; Electra at Smith College, 140–51; as form of translation, 131–33, 143–44, 148, 150; and Greek letters, 48, 58; of tragedy, 32, 111–12; varieties of, 116, 143 Thomas, M. Carey, 23–24, 33, 106, 219–22, 224 Tilton, Mary Susie, 144 tragedy: and American womanhood, 27; Aristotle’s definition of, 144; effects of, 29; engagement with, xiii, 30–31; and ideal womanhood, 26–31; reception of, 28–29, 243; theatrical performances of, 111–12, 116; translation of, 26–34; and Victorian womanhood, 26–28 translation: approaches to, xiii–xiv, 33– 34, 52; for audiences of performances, 48–51; criticisms of, 23; Dryden’s three degrees of, 66; free, 94, 103, 175; gendered character of, 77–78, 84, 88, 110; intellectual benefits of, 11, 28; and knowing/not knowing, 12, 23, 31, 44–45, 53; literal, 31, 38, 57, 61, 66, 69, 76–81, 84–86, 94, 109–10, 175, 189; original in relation to, 28, 51, 52, 53, 69; for page vs. stage, 38; paraphrastic, 65–66, 77, 79–81, 99, 101–3; as performance, 37–38, 42–43, 52, 56, 68; Prometheus Bound as analogy for, 31–32; reviews of, 84–85; theatrical productions as, 131–33, 143–44, 148, 296

150; of tragedy, 26–34; and untranslatability, xiii, 7, 31, 45, 53–56; Woolf on Aeschylus, 35–38, 53 Trevelyan, R. C., 50–51 Tripos Examination, 13–16, 19, 22–23, 92, 127–29, 130, 144 Trow, Mary Elizabeth, 145–46 Tyler, Henry Mather, 139–44; A Greek Play and Its Presentation, 140–43, 144, 148 UCL. See University College London United States: Antigone in, 238–39; classical literacy in, 104–5; Ladies’ Greek in, 23, 95–96; Prometheus Bound in, 95–115; womanhood and tragedy in, 27; women’s education in, 22, 24–25 University College London (UCL), 153, 156–59, 168, 170, 180, 258n9 University of Chicago, 138 University of Pennsylvania, 182 Vadillo, Ana, 176 Verrall, Arthur, 36, 42, 45–46, 51, 54, 212 Verrall, Margaret, 212 Wallace, Jennifer, xii, 8, 247n8, 253n28 Warner, Charles Dudley, 105 Warr, George, 39–40, 45, 46 Warwick, Florence, 240 Webster, Augusta, 32, 61, 83–88 Webster, Thomas, 86 Wellesley College, 254n56 White, Andrew Dickson, 24 White, Helen Magill, 138 whiteness, identification of Greekness with, 13, 20, 25, 240, 242 Whitman, Walt, 161 Wilde, Oscar, 124, 188 Williams, Perry, 237 Winterer, Caroline, 238–39 Woman of Letters/Greek Letters: allegory for reading of, 234–42; Browning’s Aurora Leigh as, 81; collective category of, 84; concept of, 5–6; E.B.B. as, 3, 62, 83; emergence of, xi; Fields as, Index

97; Hamilton as, 107; H.D. as, 187, 204; Levy as, 20; Magill as, 24; as New Woman, 152–53; Sikelianos as, 113 Woman Question, 26, 207 The Woman’s World (magazine), 122, 124 women, subjection of, to Greek language, 31, 59, 61–62, 69, 76, 77. See also identification; subjectivity women’s education: advocacy of, 92, 97–98; for African Americans, 25; ambiguities of, 15–16; in America, 22, 24–25; at Cambridge University, 13–24; growth of, 123; intercollegiate communication about, 138–39; justification of, 124–27, 129; performances of tragedy and, 32; and revival of Greek tragedy, 116; role of Greek in, 12–26; Tennyson on, 9–10; theatrical performances and, 124–51, 125, 223–31; Thomas and, 219; UCL and, 258n9

Women’s Education and Industrial Union, 254n56 Woolf, Leonard, 55–56 Woolf, Virginia, xiii; Agamemnon notebook, 35–38, 36, 45, 51–56, 233; and Electra, 120–22; Greek studies undertaken by, 31, 35, 39–42, 44, 55; madness of, 55–56; “On Not Knowing Greek,” 11–12, 31, 35, 37–38, 41, 44–45, 49, 53, 56, 120; “A Sketch of the Past,” 39; The Years, 55 World’s Congress of Representative Women, 25 Wright, Emily France, 138 writing: ambiguity of, 58–59; Prometheus Bound and, 57–59 Yaeger, Patricia, 202, 229 Zeitlin, Froma, 164 Zimmern, Alice, 130

Index 297