Romantic Hellenism and Women Writers

N. Comet

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137316226
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examining popular contexts of Greek revivalism associated with women, Comet challenges the masculine narrative of English Classicism by demonstrating that it thrived in non-male spaces, as an ephemeral ideal that betrayed a distrust of democratic rhetoric that ignored the social inequities of the classical world.

1

Hellenism and Women's Print Culture: “The Merit of Brevity”

The mode of instruction employed by the celebrated Grecian philosopher Socrates, may be adapted to the early tuition of infants by enlightened British ladies. Socrates assisted his pupils to explain their own ideas, by asking questions that elucidated their limited apprehension on every subject they laboured to discuss; and he imperceptibly drew them to perceive how much it depended upon their own efforts and application to surmount the ignorance and weakness which, through his insinuations, had become to them intolerable. A youth, named Eschines, after hearing Socrates imparting those lessons, exclaimed, “Socrates, I am poor, but I give myself to you without reserve.”— “You know not,” replied the sage, “what a valuable present you have made me.”—the mingled tenderness and authority of maternal communications, may be equally powerful as the discourses of Socrates.

This advertisement for Socratic childrearing appeared anonymously in the November 1820 installment of the women's journal, the Court Magazine, or La Belle Assemblée.¹ As parenting advice, the invitation to humiliate curious infants might be dismissed as unconscionable quackery. But regardless of the long-term psychological riskiness of its proposal, the passage merits consideration for its placement of the Classics in a domestic setting, among “enlightened British ladies.” Such placement defies our conventional understanding of Hellenism, which assigns the reception of Socrates to male public culture—to the university, to the learned historical essay, and the philosophical treatise. Nothing has prepared us for this intrusion of “Grecian” values into the British mother-child relationship.

Granted, the familiar narrative of Hellenism can help us to appreciate the configuration of power inscribed here, as the Socrates story presents a superficial parable of the Classics in modernity. Socrates epitomizes the texts of antiquity, through which instruction is registered as the menace of a perfectly finished yet inscrutable past—the sage—upon a tentatively becoming present—the youth. Like Eschines, modern readers of the Classics are humbled before a poverty of knowledge and are submitted to a greater power “without reserve.” Only then are they able to surmount their ignorance through the rigorous study of timetested models, long accepted as noble and impossible aspirations. This is a well-worn critical paradigm, fully explored in Walter Jackson Bate's landmark work, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970).

However, following this narrative, we get no further with the Socrates excerpt: we can neither account for its presence in a woman's magazine nor explain why its author relocates the ancient/modern power dynamic from a conventional educational setting among learning boys and learned men to a household setting among inquisitive infants and classically educated mothers. In the 1820s, few mothers of such erudition existed; the home tutors and boarding school instructors available to young upperand middle-class women seldom included the Classics in their syllabi.² But if the passage seems uncritical or overreaching in its equation of the Socratic method with “the mingled tenderness and authority of maternal communications,” and if it strikes us as (not merely bizarre but) anachronistic to see the Classics applied to a familial or feminine preoccupation in 1820, then that is because our educational histories have ignored the context in which such equations and applications were conceived.

The above excerpt is one small example of a vast and diffuse body of writing in early nineteenth-century English print media, dedicated to claiming a classical scholarship and a classical heritage for women.³ This writing targeted middle-class women readers who wished for educational parity with men and for access to the privileged discourses that would enable them to approach the commercialization of culture (including the development of mass publication itself) with comprehension and discernment. More generally, it responded to readers who were seeking an authoritative history or poetics of womanhood and who might have echoed (the uncommonly well-educated) Elizabeth Barrett Browning's lament that she looked everywhere for grandmothers and found none.⁴ In this chapter, I consider the prominence of women's magazines in shaping and disseminating a canon of Greek cultural knowledge for a female readership. In recent years, scholars such as Yopie Prins and Isobel Hurst have produced groundbreaking work concerning the role of the Classics in the development of the nineteenth-century woman intellectual within academia or at its margins.⁵ These studies primarily involve writings by women who had exceptional access to a classical education. Alternatively, I shall look at women's publications from the 1810s, 20s, and 30s that required no exceptional knowledge of their readers. These journals offered women a program of education which was external to the institutions of higher learning that still largely excluded them.

It is crucial that we recognize women's print media as a venue for English Hellenism. The failure to do so has sustained the misguided assumptions that led an early reviewer of Felicia Hemans's anonymous Modern Greece (1817) to conclude that a poem so clearly “academical” in its treatment of the Classics could not have emanated from a “female pen.”⁶ In her study of Victorian women's Hellenism, Shanyn Fiske has argued that we must overturn such a notion “that women can relate productively to Greek sources only if they achieve the literary- linguistic expertise of their male counterparts.”⁷ Women's magazines, with their highly literate but very accessible presentations of classical Greek knowledge, offered another, no less productive kind of expertise. By acknowledging that early nineteenth-century women readers and writers enjoyed a public classical training that circumvented the obstacles of educational disparity, this chapter further reconstitutes what Fiske has called women's “Popular Greek” and extends its historical and generic range.⁸ Even if the reviewer of Hemans failed to notice it, women—no less than men—were responsive to and responsible for the shaping of “Greece” in the public imagination; indeed, the poems of Hemans, Lucy Aikin, and Letitia Landon (which are the subjects of my case- studies later in this volume) should be understood as having developed with and within the mass-cultural phenomena mapped in this chapter. Women's print culture provides the literary historian with a missing link between, on the one hand, the emphasis on Greek language and history inside the classrooms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century male academia and in high-brow literary publishing and, on the other, the far-reaching popular movement that we have come to know as English Hellenism.

As it developed in numerous magazines dating to the mid-eighteenth century, the cultural education of women readers frequently had recourse to classical subjects. While refining women readers with the Classics, these magazines refined the Classics themselves, searching them for practical, suitably “feminine” values. The magazine editors appropriated lessons from classical and classicist sources that emphasized social graces, fashion, the decorative arts, women's history, and, according to a submission from the March 1816 issue of The Court Magazine, just enough literature and mythology as “is absolutely requisite in the education of an accomplished female, for the proper understanding of those two sister arts, Poetry and Painting” (13.82 N.S. p. 100). In the process, this informal education allowed for the emergence of a female classicist whose breadth of knowledge about Greek and Roman society may well have extended beyond that of a male contemporary with his narrow literary and linguistic schooling in the Classics.⁹

A complete accounting of how Greece figured in women's magazines would require more than a book in itself and would make for tiresome reading. What follows is a manageable discussion of two prominent journals selected as representative samples of their genre at the peak of English Romantic Hellenism. I have chosen The Court Magazine, or La Belle Assemblée and its rival, the Lady's Monthly Museum, because between them they display a variety and a quantity of relevant materials sufficient to establish just how prevalent Greece was in women's print culture. My selections from these publications are by no means exhaustive, but they are exemplary in their subject matter and their techniques of exposition. Moreover, the similarity that I will highlight between the two journals in classical matters points to the larger trend of women's Hellenism that they both (along with their numerous competitors) alternately led and followed.

For example, both magazines reveal an editorial aversion to direct or translated quotations from classical sources in favor of a secondary reading paradigm that simplified and bowdlerized the Classics. I will comment on the editorial and gendered implications of this paradigm below; suffice to say, this preference had the dual effect of both reinforcing long-standing claims that the violent, militaristic Classics were ill-suited to a female readership, and contesting such claims by insisting on their inclusion (albeit in an altered state). Both journals also provide evidence for a large-scale reprioritization of Hellenism among women, who were (for one thing) more interested than men in representations of “Greek” femininity. Such representations took many forms, including fashion plate illustrations of popular neoclassical dress- and hairstyles, anecdotes concerning modern Greek women, and discourses on ancient Greek heroines. Women's “Greece” differed from men's both rhetorically and substantively.

As will become increasingly evident in the readings that follow, Francophobia was another dominant feature of the Hellenism that thrived in women's print culture. While these magazines often depicted classical antiquity for its own sake (a mode of representation in which ideology is sublimated), they also invested antiquity with modern political meaning.

This metaphorical or allegorical use of the classical past was most visible during the cultural feud with France that followed from the Reign of Terror to the rise of Napoleon; in rough terms, it dissociated a French taste for imperial Roman iconography from a democratic Greek ideal that came to be the hallmark of Regency style. In this oppositional setting, the idea of Greece could be seen as emblematic of English national identity itself and, as such, the Francophobia underlying the Hellenism in women's publications was vital to the development of a distinctively female brand of English nationalism. As Linda Colley has documented, authors of female conduct literature could turn to Greece as a model for English womanhood pitted against the excesses of the French Revolution:

It was scarcely surprising that pre-existing anxieties about the position of women should have become still more intense in Britain after the war with France broke out in 1793. Even more than before, both sexes, but particularly women, were deluged by conduct books, sermons, homilies, novels and magazine articles insisting that good order and political stability necessitated the maintenance of separate sexual spheres ... Women must never forget, urged Thomas Gisborne in his best-selling Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1796), Pericles' words to the matrons of Athens: “Cherish your instinctive modesty; and look upon it as your highest commendation not to be the subject of public discourse.”¹⁰

Through Gisborne's invocation Athenian statesmanship comes to the aid of socially conservative English gender politics; as we shall see, in women's magazines, Greece also lent itself to more liberal and more liberating female English nationalisms, often with a Francophobic subtext.

The titles, subtitles or purpose-statements of women's periodicals almost always declared a twofold aim, both to entertain and to educate their readers; the Lady's Monthly Museum, for example, branded itself as a “Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction.” Accordingly, the method of my readings in this chapter is to view the Hellenism in question as part of a public classical education for and frequently by women. In a sense, I will be reconstructing a syllabus and interpreting the pedagogy that informed it. To return to the Socrates excerpt at the beginning of this chapter, I might consolidate and reframe my commentary into a single query: what was the mode of instruction behind the excerpt's own “mode of instruction”?

The Court Magazine was established in 1806 by John Bell, a liberalminded publisher best known for his affordable editions of major poets.¹¹ With this monthly publication marketed specifically to women readers, Bell demonstrated his renowned acuity as a businessman, finding a commercial niche and covering it tenaciously; by the time he sold the magazine in 1821, it had absorbed or commercially defeated several of its rivals. As its title-page declared, the journal was “addressed particularly to the ladies,” and presented a mixture of literary intelligence, news of current events both domestic and foreign, short biographies of eminent figures (almost exclusively women), sheet music, serialized short fiction, poetry, and fashion updates with plates, to which Bell eventually added color.¹² At a half-crown (later a full three shillings) it was an expensive magazine, but the appeal of its coverage and authority seems to have offset its high cost.¹³

In the present discussion of women's Greek classicism and its Francophobic undertones, it is worth pausing to comment on the French language of this magazine's extended title, La Belle Assemblée, and its original title-page illustration, which depicted an Egyptian motif (see Fig. 1.1). In appropriating ideas from France and Egypt, the name and illustration distill the ‘courtly fashion’ that would always preoccupy Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine. Despite its military and cultural threat to England, France never lost its standing as an international hub of fashion, a fact to which the magazine's many French fashion plates attested.¹⁴ Further, in 1806, when the title-page was first published, a contrived Egyptian style was nearly as fashionable as the French. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, England had sequestered many of the Egyptian and Egyptological artifacts (including the Rosetta Stone) taken by the Napoleonic army.¹⁵ While hieroglyphics would evade translation for years to come, the exoticism of these rediscovered samples of Egyptian language and culture, mostly housed in the British Museum, had a profound influence on English architecture and design, as well as on popular taste, in the early nineteenth century.¹⁶ This influence found many forms of expression; Thomas Hope's eclectic 1807 design book, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, which featured an ornate plan for an entire “Egyptian Room,” was an extreme instance of this national “Egyptomania” (see Fig. 1.2).¹⁷

As was the case with English Hellenism, this fascination with Egypt resonated with anti-French political sentiment. Indeed, it was not until after Egypt became the site of Englan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustration
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 Hellenism and Women’s Print Culture: “The Merit of Brevity”
• 2 Lucy Aikin and the Evolution of Greece “Through Infamy to Fame”
• 3 Felicia Hemans and the “Exquisite Remains” of Modern Greece
• 4 Letitia Landon and the Second Thoughts of Romantic Hellenism
• Conclusion
• Appendixes: Poetry by Letitia Landon
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index