RETHINKING THE HOMERIC HERO IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH WOMEN’S WRITING: CLASSICAL RECEPTION, FEMINIST THEORY AND CREATIVE PRACTICE Ruth MacDonald Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London. Declaration of Authorship I Ruth MacDonald hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed:_____________________________________ Date:_______________________________________ - 2 - Abstract Sustained engagements with ciphers of traditional Homeric stereotypes can be found in a number of texts written by women. This thesis will examine how three texts in particular, Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles (2001), Gwyneth Lewis’s A Hospital Odyssey (2010) and Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients (2012), allow an argument to develop for the centrality of various strategies and perspectives, such as embodiment and intersubjectivity. I suggest that the figuration of the nomad, as articulated in the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti in particular, is key to understanding both twenty-first century experiences and expressions of corporeality, as well as receptions of the Homeric hero in women’s writing today. Heroic bodies in Cook, Lewis, and Tempest are vulnerable and liminal, oscillating between borderlines or lurking at the margins, disrupting heteronormative systems and structures by transgressing boundaries, codes and limits in the relationship between value, the body and the mind as traditionally understood. Though in some obvious ways distant, the Homeric heroic body nevertheless retains a resonance and influence in twenty-first century British cultural understandings. This thesis thus explores the role of an ‘intimate other’ (the Homeric hero) in engaging classical reception, feminist politics and contemporary women’s writing in dialogue. - 3 - Acknowledgements I would like to extend my appreciation and thanks to Dr. Efi Spentzou for her dedication to her role as supervisor. I will always be grateful for the time and effort, both academically and otherwise, she has expended on my behalf. Special mention goes to my friends and colleagues in the Classics department at Royal Holloway, particularly Jos Cole, Dave Preston and Emma Ramsey, for all of their support and encouragement during the past four years. Last, but by no means least, thanks go to my family and my partner Rob, without whom none of this would have been possible. This thesis is dedicated to them. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. - 4 - Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 Table of Contents 5 Introduction: Classical Reception, Feminist Theory and Creative Practice 6 1. Nomadic Subjects: A Cartography of the Theoretical Roots of Nomadic Thought 30 2. Desire, Sensation and the Body: The Nomadic Subject in Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles 52 3. ‘A man who’s putrid/ is hard to pity’: Overcoming Abjection in Gwyneth Lewis’s A Hospital Odyssey 108 4. Everyday Epics: Κλέος and the Transformative Encounter in Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients 159 Concluding Thoughts 204 Bibliography of Works Cited 207 - 5 - Introduction: Classical Reception, Feminist Theory and Creative Practice This thesis explores how notions of the heroic are being reconsidered in twenty-first century British women writers’ receptions of the Homeric hero. The study will examine Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles (2002), Gwyneth Lewis’s A Hospital Odyssey (2010) and Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients (2012), whose approaches, although varying in style and content, all belie mutual concerns regarding the status and significance of the body in relation to postmodern subjectivities. I am arguing that Homeric notions of the heroic are being reconsidered by these writers in light of very contemporary concerns surrounding the materiality of the body and that this intersection between feminist theory and women’s acts of classical reception is something of a cultural phenomenon. I will analyse the ways in which contemporary feminist thought appears to be reflected in their writings and asking why they seem to be inspired by classical source text/s as a way to explore these concerns. Many considerations influenced my decision to focus on this intersection between feminism, classical reception and contemporary women’s writing in Britain. Nonetheless, that which has arrested me most is the preoccupation with embodied materiality apparent in the work of each author under study. This emphasis on what a body can do encompasses a number of critical concerns, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari articulate: We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.1 With this in mind, we must ask ourselves: how is the body comprised (physically, socially and psychically)? What are the boundaries of the body, between bodies? How 1 Deleuze and Guattari 2004 [1980]: 284. - 6 - do we interrogate the relationship between the mind and the body? How do subjects understand their bodies? How does embodied experience relate to subjectivity and identity? How do embodied subjects interact? In what ways do the social, the political, the cultural, the biological, the scientific and the technological encode the body and script our identities? As each author has chosen to focus on the heroic body in their texts, the questions posed in this study are necessarily framed by a critical focus on issues of gender and sexuality. All three explore and problematise traditional gender binaries, illuminating their restrictive, artificial qualities, whilst still acknowledging their influence in twenty-first century British society. In their writing, Cook, Lewis and Tempest advocate for increasingly inclusive and nuanced modes of articulating contemporary subjectivities that are fluid, non-unitary and situated within an intersubjective and material world. This is an approach which is very much in line with the current materialist turn in feminist theory. Materialist feminist thought is grounded in the recognition of difference and specificity between subjects, whilst simultaneously advocating the conscious creation of connections with the other in ways which are demanding, continuous and negotiated within a particular socio-historical moment. Positioning the subject as embodied, i.e. the product of both natural and cultural forces, it rejects exclusionary phallogocentric2 modes of thought, involving a commitment to the subject as open- ended and engaging in a continuous process of becoming. This thesis will examine how the hero is perceived and articulated in contemporary women’s acts of classical reception, as well as the ways in which heroic bodies are portrayed as liminal, as oscillating in the interstices between binary oppositions. In this way, the work of Cook, Lewis and Tempest disrupts heteronormative systems, rejecting the hierarchical 2 Derrida 1968. The term ‘phallogocentric’ is used to describe Jacques Derrida’s theory that Western culture (i.e. the patriarchal Symbolic order as defined by Lacan) is controlled by the two concepts of logocentrism and phallocentrism. The former is, in Derrida’s argument, the mistaken belief of and desire for a set of truths which pre-exist and are independent of the signs which are used to identify them within the linguistic system. Derrida employs the latter term to communicate the way in which logocentrism has become primarily patriarchal. This is to say that the concept of phallogocentrism prioritises the phallus and patriarchal discourse. As a result, women must necessarily participate within this masculine economy which characterises them as lack and other. - 7 - structures which define the relationship between the body and the subject as traditionally understood. I will argue that in contemporary British women’s acts of classical reception, although the body is articulated as being socially and historically contingent, it also expresses an innate potentiality for new models of the subject outside of hierarchical binaries. As such, I have come to consider these writers’ assorted strategies and approaches as ‘nomadic’ and suggest that the figuration of the nomad, as articulated in the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti in particular, is key to understanding twenty-first century experiences and expressions of embodiment.3 Thus, the aim of this thesis is to explore the implications of nomadism for classical reception, feminist politics and women’s writing today. WOMEN’S WRITING IN THE 21ST CENTURY Before exploring the potential interrelations, and perhaps tensions, between nomadism, feminism and literary perspectives on the body, I would like to present a few apposite thoughts about the position of women’s writing in Britain today. The turn of the millennium has seen the British literary scene continuing to foster a diverse creative culture, giving rise to a range of different voices and textual productions.4 What is more, contemporary British writing, broadly understood, has increasingly come to the attention of the academy, growing into a significant field of study within the last twenty years5 and hosting a wide range of critical approaches, theories and perspectives.6 A number of authors whose works