Dangerous Voices. Women's Laments and Greek Literature (review)

Reviews 157 so first. To my knowledge, no other book like it exists in English. There are books on travel to Greece, to say nothing of the books on Romantic Hellenism, German Hellenism, Philhellenism, Victorian Hellenism, the spoliation of Hellenism , even Byron's Hellenism. Now Angelomatis-Tsougarakis has given us a work on travelers' perceptions of the world they visited. The product is an immensely useful resource for anyone interested not only in the phenomenon of travel to Greece but also in something much less known—Greece's condition prior to the emergence of the Greek state. Artemis Leontis The Ohio State University Gail Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices. Women's Laments and Greek Literature. London and New York: Routledge. 1992. Pp. 227. $39.95. This absorbing, sensitive, and uneven book tackles a subject that no student of Greek literature, of any period, can afford to ignore. If it raises more questions than it can answer, that is by no means to its discredit. In a sequence of six somewhat loosely connected chapters, the author ranges widely over the lament from Homer to contemporary Greek poetry by women, building on earlier studies but treating their assumptions judiciously and with welcome circumspection. She gently explodes some of the rather glib conclusions of earlier social anthropologists and avoids undue speculation; she rightly resists the blanket imposition of such terms as "marginalization" in relation to the position of Greek women and eschews a naively structuralist approach. On the other hand, it is possibly the case that she sometimes takes a source too literally: some will feel, for example, that an interpretation of the lament discussed on pp. 85-86 in terms of the folk motif of the "valiant maid" would have gotten us further than parallels with the very different circumstances of the Resistance in Greece. The present review inevitably concentrates on what Dangerous Voices offers the student of modern Greece. But in taking ancient and modern Greek literature together the author richly confirms the scholarly consensus that the lament is, par excellence, a subject that it is legitimate, even imperative, to see in a long-term perspective. It is true that this broad sweep has not been entirely without costs. Regretfully, there are flaws in the book's presentation: errors in the Greek citations, the translations, and the references that should be set to rights in a future edition. (It is true, however, that few of these errors bear importantly on interpretation.) More generally speaking, while the author understandably wishes to avoid traversing once more the ground of previous studies by, especially, Margaret Alexiou and Loring M. Danforth, the presence of Byzantium and indeed of the Orthodox Church in this book is surprisingly little 158 Reviews felt. Perhaps the most important contribution of Margaret Alexiou's The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974) was precisely its rich documentation and sober analysis of the Byzantine tradition, which "romantic Philhellenism"—from which few of us, the author of Dangerous Voices included, are exempt—is usually tempted to overleap. In particular , the apparent conflict between Orthodox doctrine and the folk beliefs addressed on, for example, p. 10 needs to be read now in the light of Charles Stewart's Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (Princeton, Newjersey: Princeton University Press, 1991). A consequence of this book's approach is that the reader will sometimes be jumping all the way from Antigone in ca. 441 B.C. to Kalávrita in A.D. 1943, something highly thought-provoking from a literary point of view but a little worrying to the historian. The question of history arises with particular sharpness in relation to the account of the Maniât laments given in Chapter 3. This part of the book is in some ways the most rewarding: the comments on pp. 69-72 about the woman's position at the heart of the revenge lament are original and important , opening a rich vein of interpretation. There is no doubt, moreover, that the Maniât lament is not only a neglected genre (although, curiously, there is no reference here to Gareth Morgan's useful survey, "The Laments of Mani" (Folklore 84 [1973...