CLASSICAL RECEPTION IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S WRITING: EMERGING STRATEGIES FROM RESISTANCE TO INDETERMINACY by POLLY STOKER A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology School of History and Cultures College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham April 2019 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT The reader who rewrites remains a vital interlocutor between the classical past and the modern classicist. However, the neglect of the female reader in classical reception studies is an omission that becomes ever more conspicuous, and surely less sustainable, as women writers continue to dominate the contemporary creative field. This thesis makes the first steps towards fashioning a new aesthetic model for the female reader based on irony, ambivalence, and indeterminacy. I consider works by Virginia Woolf, Alice Oswald, Elizabeth Cook, and Yael Farber, all of whom largely abandon ‘resistance’ as a strategy of rereading and demand a new theoretical framework that can engage with and recognize the multivalence of women’s reading and rewriting. The interactions between the works of Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, and Jane Gallop help to spotlight what is at stake for the contemporary female reader who rewrites and manage the tension between rescue, rehabilitation, and post-structuralist play that the ironic, ambivalent, and/or indeterminate female reader negotiates. This work is dedicated to my mam, with love and gratitude. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My sincerest thanks go to my supervisor, Dr Elena Theodorakopoulos, for her guidance, patience, and support. I can think of no more insightful reader for my writing. She has championed my work tirelessly and I will always be incredibly grateful for her kindness. Thanks also go to my friends and family for their encouragement over the years. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 The (Male) Reader in the Text 5 1.2 Classical Reception in Contemporary Women’s Writing 9 1.3 Between Critical and Creative Practice 20 1.4 Virginia Woolf and the Female Reader 28 1.5 Emerging Strategies 44 1.6 Thesis Overview 63 2. REREADING ARISTOPHANES AND HOMER THROUGH VIRGINIA WOOLF 67 2.1 Comic-Seriousness in Aristophanes 69 2.2 The Lysistrata Project 75 2.2.1 Taking Obscenity Seriously 87 2.3 Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Society’ 96 2.4 Woolf’s Three Guineas, Comic-Seriousness, and Homer 108 2.4.1 Military Masculinity 117 2.4.2 Telemachus 127 2.4.3 Thersites 137 2.5 Contemporary Comic-Serious Receptions of Homer 143 2.5.1 Alice Oswald and Christopher Logue 144 2.5.2 Michael Longley 148 2.6 Conclusion 154 3. ALICE OSWALD’S MEMORIAL 156 3.1 Remembering the Dead 161 3.1.1 War Writing 161 3.1.2 Remembering and Forgetting 175 3.1.3 Lament 181 3.2 Local Monuments 186 3.2.1 Women and Anti-Monumental Remembrance 193 3.3 From Troy to the Trenches 199 3.3.1 The ‘Old Paradigm’ 208 3.3.2 Remembering Protesilaus and Hector 213 3.3.3 ‘We Will Remember Them’ 218 3.4 Conclusion 228 4. ELIZABETH COOK’S ACHILLES 233 4.1 Reading Keats Reading the Classics 237 4.2 Reading Keats as a Woman 251 4.2.1 Cook, Keats, and Female-Rewriting 257 4.3 The Performance of Mourning 269 4.3.1 Remembering Keats 276 4.4 Gender and Performance 284 4.5 Conclusion 293 4.6. Coda: Peleus and Thetis via Keats 294 5. YAEL FARBER’S MOLORA 313 5.1 The Play 317 5.2 Penelope 326 5.2.1 Remembering Differently 338 5.2.2 Women and Memory 342 5.3 Critical Reception 352 5.4 Reconciliation 366 5.4.1 The Chorus 366 5.4.2 Epilogue 376 5.5 Conclusion 383 6. CONCLUSION: FROM RESISTANCE TO INDETERMINACY 385 7. BIBLIOGRAPHY 401 1. INTRODUCTION This thesis takes part in and reflects on the growth of classical reception, a sub- discipline within the broader academic field of Classics, and its turn to the reader and her role as ‘co-creator’ of meaning.1 The veritable explosion in recent decades of women readers who rewrite classical literature as poets, prose writers, and playwrights is arguably one of the most significant recent developments in the afterlives of the texts of Greek and Roman antiquity. In my new interpretations of modern trends in the reception of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2011), Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles (2001), and Yael Farber’s Molora (2008), I add my voice to the significant number of classicists attentive to the persistence of classical myth, literature, and thought across several millennia, though with an especial connection to the relatively smaller group for whom women’s return to and reinvigoration of the classical past merit particular attention.2 While the academic project of attending to the reception of classical literature can now boast almost three decades’ worth of sustained activity, due attention to women’s writing does not enjoy an equivalent heritage. In the agenda-setting monograph for classical reception studies, Charles Martindale fails to draw on a single female writer as he re-examines the texts of Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Lucan through the readings and rewritings of Shakespeare, 1 Iser (1978). 2 For bibliographic references, see Oswald (2011a); E. Cook (2002); Farber (2008a). 1 Milton, Eliot and others.3 Martindale is typically credited with bringing Hans Robert Jauss’s aesthetic of reception, which Jauss formulated from the late 1960s with his inaugural lecture at the University of Konstanz, to the attention of the discipline.4 Jauss’s ‘provocation’ set out his new approach to literary history and broadcast the radicalism of the new university and the Konstanz school of literary studies.5 However, Jauss and his peers did not consider that the burgeoning second wave feminist movement, and its mobilization of the female reader and rewriter to challenge positivism and the canon, might come to have a meaningful role to play in their re-vision of the academic humanities.6 Classical reception studies not only inherits its 3 Martindale (1993). See also, Martindale (1991), (2001), (2006), (2007), (2010), (2013a), (2013b). For critical reflections on Martindale’s formulation of reception theory, see Batstone (2006); De Pourcq (2012); Easterling (2013); J. I. Porter (2008). 4 Jauss (1982, 3-45) [1967]. The title of the lecture - ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’ – gestures to Jauss’s challenge to traditional literary criticism (in German: ‘Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft’). Iser (1978) is another member of the Konstanz school and Martindale’s recent work that takes Walter Pater’s classicism as an aesthetic model brushes up against Iser’s interest in Pater (1987) [1960], see e.g., Martindale (2005); Martindale et al. (2017). 5 For Jauss’s shifting relationship with literary traditions, see Wagner (1984). For the Konstanz school, see Holub (1995). 6 For context, the emergence of second wave feminism as part of the social and political movements that culminated in 1968 means that the omission of feminism and the female reader from the early formulations of reception theory is not for want of profile, material, or relevance. For subsequent attempts to marry reader-response with feminist literary criticism, see Shweickart (1986); 2 theoretical model from Jauss and the Konstanz school but also its remarkable neglect of women as readers and rewriters.7 also the review essay on gender and reading in Caughie (1988), as well as Flynn (1986). The feminist approaches to gender and reading mirror the shifts in feminist literary criticism that I will trace in this chapter, focusing on the female reader of male-authored texts, see e.g., Davies et al. (1987); or the female reader of female writers, see e.g., Pearce (1992). There is also a body of post-structuralist work that considers gendered reading as a strategy of literary criticism, see e.g., the male critic Jonathan Culler’s work on ‘reading as a woman’ (1982); and the surrounding debate in Fuss (1989); S. Mills (1994, 32-34); Modleski (1986). For the female reader and feminism, see Flynn and Schweichkart (1986); S. Mills (1994a), (1994b). The female reader who rewrites obviously predates the second wave, with the likes of Virginia Woolf or, even earlier, Christine de Pisan offering insight into the impact of gender on, to borrow Jauss’s term, the ‘horizon of expectation’ out of which the reader makes meaning. There are clear overlaps between the works that emerged alongside, or even before, the publications of the Konstanz school and the early works of feminist criticism that prioritized the (female) reader, even if they did not explicitly engage with reception theory. For instance, Simone De Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), translated into English as The Second Sex in 1953 [1988]; Mary Ellmann’s Thinking About Women (1968); and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), based on her Ph.D dissertation. I would also include Carolyn Heilbrun’s re-vision of Shakespeare’s Gertrude in ‘The Character of Hamlet’s Mother’ (1957). 7 In the collection of Jauss’s work in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982), translated by Timothy Bahti, Mme.