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 5 “Such Are Not Woman’sThoughts” amy levy’s “xantippe” and “medea” O T. D. Olverson I n 1883, Amy Levy published an essay on one of her favorite poets, the recently deceased James Thomson. The essay is not only an attempt to secure Thomson’s posthumous reputation as a meritorious “Minor Poet” but also a strong endorsement of Thomson’s philosophical pessimism. Levy clearly identiWed with Thomson, admiring the passion in his work: the “hungry cry for life, for the things of this human, Xesh and blood life; for love and praise, for mere sunlight and sun’s warmth.”1 Levy also makes clear that Thomson’s “nudity of expression”and moments of “absolute vulgarity”threaten his reputation as a truly talented poet. Attempting to redress the balance, Levy suggests that one major failing of Thomson was that he lacked “one graceful Wnish of our latter-day bards; the pretty modern-classical trick.” He had “neither the You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher.  levy’s “xantippe” and “medea” wit nor the taste”to drape his work “in the garb of ancient Greece or mediæval France.”2 For a writer who supposedly lacked the “classical trick,” Thomson was actually well acquainted with classical material. In 1866,Thomson wrote an essay entitled “AWord for Xantippe,” in which he examines the reputation of the wife of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates.Thomson invites respectable Victorian matrons to follow Socrates home to “judge whether Xantippe had or had not the right to scold and rage, and even to pour out vessels of wrath.”3 He concludes that there is only one living writer “with genius and learning and wisdom and fairness enough to picture truly the conjugal life of Saint Socrates and shrew Xantippe” (227). For Thomson, the only suitable candidate was George Eliot. Eliot, a Wne classicist, never took up Thomson’s invitation, but the young Amy Levy did. Levy had the wit, the wisdom, and the erudition to garb her philosophy in the guise of ancient Greece. After all, like Eliot, Levy’s liberal education included ancient Greek philosophy and drama, which provided her with another language, literally and Wguratively, with which to explore her philosophical and political concerns. Levy’s classical education and appropriation of Hellenic discourse are particularly evident in her two long “Greek” poems, “Xantippe” and “Medea: A Fragment in Dramatic Form,”republished in A Minor Poet and OtherVerse (1884). I argue that “Xantippe” should be read in light of Levy’s developing erudition and political awareness, whereas Levy’s “Medea”must be seen in terms of its Anglo-Jewish context and Levy’s personal concerns regarding her feminism and her Jewish heritage. In both poems, however, Levy employs the “garb of ancient Greece” to powerful political eVect. The place of women within Victorian Hellenism has, until recently, been largely overlooked. Yet as recent studies by Isobel Hurst and Yopie Prins have shown, the proliferation of Greek subjects in women’s literature from the middle of the century suggests a collective movement into the classical tradition by women writers and scholars, rather than comprehensive exclusion from it.4 Amy Levy was just one of an increasing number of women who sought to rewrite the ancient past in theVictorian period. Beginning in midcentury, writers such as George Eliot, AugustaWebster, and (later) Michael Field,Vernon Lee, and Mona Caird all adapted “classic” archetypes, which challenged contemporary cultural and ideological conventions. The works that these women produced, as Ruth Hoberman suggests, reXect “their reading, their resistance, and their working through: their repetition of received versions, their hints of alternative visions, and above all the recurrence of gender and sexuality as issues linked to You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher.  T. D. Olverson power.These writers thus gender classicism, exposing apparently gender-neutral accounts of the past as stories of male experience.”5 Throughout theVictorian period, knowledge of the classics, especially the language and literature of ancient Greece, was the gold standard of the British education system. However, for much of the nineteenth century it was very diYcult for young middle-class girls with academic ambitions to acquire a suYciently rigorous...

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