Γυναίκες θεατρικοί συγγραφείς στα χρόνια της επανάστασης και το έργο τους (review)

This is the fourth volume in the series "Theatriki Vivliothiki" (Theater Library) produced by the Kostas and Eleni Ouranis foundation. The aim of the series is to reproduce with commentaries Greek plays from the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods. In this volume Puchner presents the work of three women dramatists, who wrote during the 1820s. They are Mitio Sakellariou, Elisavet Moutzan-Martinengou, and Evanthia Kairi. The first translated two comedies by the Venetian writer Carlo Goldoni (I Evgnomon Douli and I Panourgos Xira), the second produced an adaptation of Moliere's The Miser, and the third wrote the first patriotic drama based on the Greek revolution (Nikiratos). The editor of the volume, Walter Puchner, has two aims in this work; the first is to make available to a contemporary audience four relatively obscure and unknown theatrical texts from the early nineteenth century, and the second is to acquaint them with works by women writers who wrote plays at a time when women's roles in society largely prohibited such activities. Puchner introduces the three women dramatists as pioneers in women's and feminist writing in Greece, pointing out their distinct female/feminine consciousness and stressing their decision to address a female readership.

This hefty volume is a scholarly and critical edition of four plays accompanied by a lengthy introduction that provides an analytical and comparative study of the three women writers and their works. In the introduction, among other things, Puchner puts forth a forceful claim that these works were self-consciously written from a proto-feminist perspective. Following contemporary trends of feminist criticism, Puchner argues that female writing during the early nineteenth century in Greece and elsewhere served recreational, pedagogical, and psychotherapeutical goals. By virtue of its length (250 pages) and the importance of its argument that the work of women writers should be included in any discussion of the development of modern Greek literature, this introduction could well stand as a separate monograph in its own right.

For the sake of clarity, Puchner devises categories based on class, social milieu, and his assessment of the quality of their work in order to place each writer in her proper context within modern Greek literature. This has two results. First it leads Puchner to be rather over-critical of these authors' works while simultaneously over-romanticizing them personally—this last, perhaps, an inevitable result of when a male critic adopts a feminist perspective in his analysis of works by women. Nonetheless, it needs to be stressed that the study takes into account the actual historical and geographical situation as well as of the specific familial and social conditions of each of the three women dramatists in order to consider both the similarities and differences between them in terms of the content and style of their work. Unfortunately, because of the nature of the historical sources for the early nineteenth century, Puchner has to focus only on the roles that men, most importantly fathers, played in shaping the cultural, social, and intellectual development of these women. Consequently, all three writers emerge as man-made entities, as products of enlightened fathers, husbands, or brothers, while, strangely, all other female personalities in their families, who might constitute a possible female line of thought and attitude, remain suppressed and invisible.

This is merely to suggest that Puchner's study, despite its undeniable scholarly value, is only a preliminary one from the point of view of gender analysis. In that respect it can open the way for a more complete study of the cultural development of these three remarkable women writers from a sociological feminist perspective and could provide a vehicle for investigating the history of women at the time of the Greek revolution. It is my hope that future research will examine how women resisted and found accommodation with the dominant patriarchal ideology of the time while simultaneously devising modes of self-expression through literature. Such an exhaustive study might reveal as well that these three women intellectuals were not as unique as Puchner seems to think.

More generally, the introduction is a very...