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Copyright by Veronica Leigh House 2006 The Dissertation Committee for Veronica Leigh House certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: BACKWARD TO YOUR SOURCES, SACRED RIVERS: A TRANSATLANTIC FEMINIST TRADITION OF MYTHIC REVISION Committee: ______________________________________ Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Co-Supervisor ______________________________________ Lesley Dean-Jones, Co-Supervisor ______________________________________ Lisa Moore ______________________________________ Brian Bremen ______________________________________ Charles Rossman BACKWARD TO YOUR SOURCES, SACRED RIVERS: A TRANSATLANTIC FEMINIST TRADITION OF MYTHIC REVISION by Veronica Leigh House, B.A., M.F.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2006 BACKWARD TO YOUR SOURCES, SACRED RIVERS: A TRANSATLANTIC FEMINIST TRADITION OF MYTHIC REVISION Publication No. __________ Veronica Leigh House, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2006 Co-Supervisors: Elizabeth Butler Cullingford and Lesley Dean-Jones This project examines the under-explored tradition of post-WWII mythological poetry by women. The poets in the study engage in cultural politics both by subverting and reaffirming the foundational stories of the Western literary tradition. Greek myths offer some of literature’s strongest and most eloquent female characters, and yet they provide the model for misogynist representations of women in the arts. Post-WWII mythic revision is partly a response to the male high modernist’s (particularly Pound’s and Eliot’s) return to a Greek heroic ideal. The women poets respond to three sets of texts: the original Greek, the male modernist poets’ versions of the myths, and previous mythic revisions by women. By juxtaposing poets who employ mythic revision, this iv project exposes a transatlantic literary dialogue between generations of poets and demonstrates the tradition’s centrality to 20th-century literature and feminist theory. The project traces this dialogue through H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961), in which the archetypal figures of Helen and Achilles interrogate various accounts of their past and rewrite their lives. The chapter argues that H.D. revises cultural ideas of masculinity and femininity through her engagement with the Iliad’s concept of glory. The second chapter analyzes the transformation of Sylvia Plath’s poetic persona from victim, Electra, to avenger, Clytemnestra, due to Plath’s growing sense of anger at gendered social injustice. H.D.’s investigations into gender identity and Plath’s poetics of rage would influence the mythic revisions of second-wave feminist poets such as Adrienne Rich, who is the subject of Chapter Three. During the 1970s, Rich used the Demeter/Persephone myth to explore what she perceived as the principal problem in patriarchal cultures—the ruptured relationship between women and their need for re-union through radical lesbianism. Chapter Four addresses the intersection of myth with domestic violence and psychological abuse, social problems that were becoming visible when Margaret Atwood revised the Circe/Odysseus relationship in her poetic sequence “Circe / Mud Poems” (1974). Chapter Five turns to questions of age and race theories in contemporary revisions of the Demeter and Persephone myth by Eavan Boland and Rita Dove. In mapping myth’s place and function for each poet in the dissertation, this project charts the personal, aesthetic, and political motivations underlying the mythic revisions and locates them within the feminist social and theoretical movements of the second half of the 20th century. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: “Charging, head-on, the female chaos”: The High Modernist Homeric Return and Women Poets’ Call to Re-Action . 1 Chapter One: “Un-writ in the scrolls of history, Un-sung as yet by the poets”: H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and the Revision of Kleos Culture . 19 Chapter Two: “The stilts of an old tragedy”: Sylvia Plath’s Complex Electra . 61 Chapter Three: “The truth breaks moist and green”: The Mysteries of Adrienne Rich’s Radical Feminism . 99 Chapter Four: “Good words that still work”: Margaret Atwood’s Transformed Circe . 137 Chapter Five: Contemporary Poets at the Crossroads . 173 Works Cited . 212 Vita . 226 vi Introduction: “Charging, head-on, the female chaos”: The High Modernist Homeric Return and Women Poets’ Call to Re-Action In 431 B.C.E. the revolutionary and subversive classical playwright Euripides, whose plays often contain scathing social commentary on the repression of women, produced his Medea. Just before Jason appears on stage for the first time in all his unapologetic egotism and declares his determination to send Medea and their sons into exile so that he may remarry, the all-female chorus sings, Flow backward to your sources, sacred rivers, And let the world’s great order be reversed. It is the thoughts of men that are deceitful, Their pledges that are loose. Story shall now turn my condition to a fair one, Women are paid their due. No more shall evil-sounding fame be theirs. Cease now, you muses of the ancient singers, To tell the tale of my unfaithfulness; For not on us did Phoebus, lord of music, Bestow the lyre’s divine Power, for otherwise I should have sung an answer To the other sex. (Medea ll. 410-429)1 Twenty-five hundred years after this radical call for women to tell their own stories, women poets are claiming Phoebus’s lyre to answer male-authored mythological literature. In Backward to Your Sources, Sacred Rivers I examine post-WWII transatlantic women’s poetry that takes Greek mythology as its central topos. Like high modernism, women’s mythic revision is a tradition at the heart of twentieth-century literature. This 1 See Euripides. Medea. Trans. Rex Warner. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1946. 1 study investigates poets who challenge both the ancient literary representations of women and the high modernist appropriations of the classics. They do so in ways that have entered into political and social discourses about literary authority, femininity and masculinity, oppression, violence, race, and age. Even while the poets rework certain aspects of the Greek myths that they find troubling, they see the inherent power in the stories and decide to use that power for personal and social revelation. Carol Christ writes about mythic revision: “While not precluding the need for other forms of social, political, and ethical action, the process of re-imagining symbols is itself a social, political, and profoundly ethical act. It is one of the ways we transform the world” (She Who Changes 228). For the purposes of this study, I use the phrase “Greek myths” to signify particular written version of the broader category of “myth,” which comprises all variations of the stories, including those passed down orally from generation to generation. Because myths exist in multiple versions, ancient writers did not create from scratch; their artistic contribution lay in how they changed the stories. It is crucial to recognize that modern feminist artists are engaging in a several millennia-old tradition of mythic revision. Indeed, revision is at the heart of mythmaking. This study tracks mythic revision from the 1950s through the second-wave feminist movement, and into contemporary feminism, to highlight individual achievements and to show the collective effect of these highly varied works on post-WWII literature and feminist thought and practice. I am working from the understanding that Western culture is and has been patriarchal and that among the discourses supporting patriarchy—however varied the tradition—is Greek mythology. Greek myths offer some of literature’s strongest and 2 most eloquent female characters, and yet they provide the model for misogynist representations of women in the arts. The poets whom I study engage in cultural politics by both subverting and reaffirming the foundational stories of the Western literary tradition. I survey the use of Greek myth by H.D., Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Margaret Atwood, Eavan Boland, and Rita Dove to highlight larger cultural, political, and feminist issues. Some of these writers call themselves feminists, some do not; some are actively involved in political and social movements, others are not. All read other women writers and are aware of their place in a wider literary tradition, though some elect to identify specifically as women poets, others as poets first, women second. I have chosen to focus on particular moments of mythic revision in these poets’ careers to offer one possible reading of the dense and complicated history of post-WWII women’s writing. The project offers a variety of voices and perspectives, from women of different ages, sexual identities, ethnicities, and nationalities, to emphasize that this is not a monolithic tradition, but one that is as dynamic and multivocal as the Greek corpus that the women revise. The women in this study were not only rewriting the classical stories, however. The high modernist criteria for poetic selection and discrimination that I discuss below had a profound impact on women poets who were raised on modernism’s literary exclusivity and misogyny and who were taught to emulate Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Poet/scholar Alicia Ostriker has confessed, “During my school years I wrote poems that appropriated the cadences of T.S. Eliot but twisted angrily away from his meaning. Writing what he would hate, in forms approximating bits of his rhythms, was a form of 3 battle” (“My H.D.” 6). At a recent poetry reading, Eavan Boland explained women poets’ uses of myth: “We took the language in which we were humiliated and made it tell our story” (November 3, 2005, University of Texas). Several of the post-WWII poets in this study respond, therefore, to three sets of texts: the Greek originals, male modernist appropriations of the myths, and previous mythic revisions by women.