Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination, and: Persephone Rises, 1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality (review)

“We are all Greeks,” writes Percy Bysshe Shelley in the preface to Hellas (1822), “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece” (The Major Works, edited by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill [Oxford, 2008], 549). Long associated with a male social and intellectual elite, Hellenism in the Victorian period has more recently been understood as a pervasive phenomenon, sometimes radically opposed to the values of the establishment. Critics have examined subversive revisions of canonical materials by classically educated aesthetes, appropriations of Greek tragedy that enabled women writers to articulate rage and despair, and burlesque versions of Homer and Sophocles on the popular stage. Shanyn Fiske’s Heretical Hellenism and Margot K. Louis’s Persephone Rises continue this recent trend and significantly advance our understanding of the Victorian reception of ancient Greece. The reworkings of Greek myth examined here challenge conceptions of Victorian religion, gender, and sexuality. Louis explores the impact of a single mythological figure, Persephone, on British and North American literature in the late Victorian period and the early twentieth century. Fiske finds diverse examples of Greek literature and mythology “deeply entrenched in Victorian popular culture” and in three case studies of women writers (4).

Fiske’s question “How were the Greeks interpreted, adapted and altered to appeal to the interests of a general audience?” is most consistently pursued in her first chapter on Victorian Medeas (18), in which sensational journalism and melodrama are her main sources. She reads the “destabilization of gender assumptions and domestic values” in versions of the Greek tragedy most frequently performed on the London stage (25). A heroine whose rage culminates in infanticide, Medea could yet be represented sympathetically as the victim of an unjust society and a cruel husband. Adaptations of the drama, as Edith Hall has shown, influenced debates over divorce by highlighting the suffering of the deserted wife (and in some cases omitting the killing of the children). Fiske deals with texts that confront the heroine’s violent acts, and intriguingly locates her in the context of murder trials covered by the popular press. The courtroom performances of women like Maria Manning and Madeleine Smith, she argues, influenced notable tragediennes who played Medea, such as Adelaide Ristori, while providing inspiration for the criminal heroines of sensation fiction. An increasingly nuanced understanding of female subjectivity allowed for the transformation of violent, socially deviant women into complex tragic heroines.

In her discussion of the dissemination of Hellenism in newspapers and literary periodicals, Fiske opens up fruitful areas for future research. Victorians without Greek could engage with the ancient world by reading translations, reviews, and accounts of scholarly controversies, such as Thomas De Quincey’s articles on the unity of the Iliad and Odyssey. These articles, she contends, shaped Charlotte Brontë’s understanding of the idea of literary genius. Like Lucy Snowe improvising her classical essay in Villette (1853), Brontë uses her imagination to supplement her fragmentary learning. Elegantly articulating the creative potential of a self-consciously imperfect engagement with antiquity, Fiske opposes the idea that the Victorian reception of ancient Greece should be represented principally by those who could read Homer in the original language.

The second half of Heretical Hellenism is concerned less with popular culture than with liberating the Greeks from the stuffy complacency of the Victorian academy. Passionate students of Greek like George Eliot and Jane Ellen Harrison could read ancient texts and dispute the authorship of the Homeric poems with eminent classical scholars. They aspired to circumvent their deficiencies in traditional philological learning by creating alternative approaches to knowledge “that differed productively from the classical inheritance of men” (8). Perhaps because Eliot’s use of...