Jennifer Wallace

“Copying Shelley's Letters”: Mary Shelley and the Uncanny Erotics of Greek

I often revisit Marlow in thought. The curse of this life is that whatever is once known can never be unknown. You inhabit a spot which before you inhabit it is as indifferent to you as any other spot upon the earth, & when, persuaded by some necessity you think to leave it, you leave it not—it clings to you & with memories of things which in your experience of them gave no such promise, revenges your desertion. (LPBS 2: 6)

‘Things Foreign’?: Classical Education and Knowledge

When Charles Lamb came to look back upon his days at Christ’s Hospital, his clearest memory was of his consciousness of distinction: For the Christ’s Hospital boy feels that he is no charity boy; he feels it in the antiquity and regality of the foundation to which he belongs; in the usage which he meets with at school, and the treatment he is accustomed to out of its bounds; in the respect, and even the kindness, which his well-known garb never fails to procure him in the streets of the metropolis; and he feels it in his education, in that measure of classical attainments which every individual at that school, though not destined to a learned profession, has it in his power to procure — attainments which it would be worse than folly to put in the reach of the labouring classes to acquire.1

‘Hope beyond Ourselves’: Orientalising Greece

One of the most arresting moments in Euripides’ play The Bacchae is the first entry of the chorus of Bacchic women. Whooping their way across the stage, the women appear wild and uncontrollable. Smelling of wine and the untamed countryside outside the city walls, they are liberated from formal constraints. More crucially, they have been orientalised, overwhelmed by the god Dionysus who has returned from Asia where he introduced his dances and rites. The women’s rituals are typically eastern and mysterious, at once seductive and barbaric. Pentheus the king resists the new religion as a threatening import from foreign lands, while at the same time recognising its attractions. As he prepares his disguise so that he can watch the women undetected, it is unclear whether he is adopting the alien women’s attire or whether he is releasing the latent femininity within him, a femininity evident in Dionysus’s ambiguous identity. In Pentheus’s confrontation of the Bacchic women and subsequent seduction by them, the play dramatises the polarities between male and female, between west and east. Pentheus’s defence of his city against the external female threat seems a classic case of the western Greek polis against eastern barbaric hordes.1

‘We are all Greeks’: The Greek War of Independence

On 7 March 1821, the Phanariot Prince Alexandros Hypsilanti issued a declaration in Jassy, Moldavia, calling the Greeks to arms in order to fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire: ‘The hour has struck, valiant Greeks. Let us unite with enthusiasm, our country calls us on.’ Almost immediately Turks were attacked throughout Moldavia, Wallachia and Bulgaria. Two weeks later the Archbishop of Patras hoisted a blue-and-white banner and proclaimed Greek independence. Shelley described events in a letter to The Morning Chronicle the following month: The Prince Ipsilanti, a Greek nobleman, who had been Aid-de camp to the Emperor of Russia, has entered the Northern boundaries of European Turkey, with a force of 10,000 men, levied from among the Greeks inhabiting the Russian Empire, and has already advanced to Bucharest. His proclamation has produced a simultaneous insurrection throughout Greece… The Greeks dispersed over Europe, whether as mercenaries or students at the Universities, are hastening to join the army… The Turks have been completely driven from the Morea, and Revolutionary movements have taken place in several of the Islands. Every circumstance seems to combine to promise success to an enterprise, in which every enlightened mind must sympathise, not less from the hopes than the memories with which it is connected.1

‘The Common-hall of the Ancients’: Democracy, Dialogue and Drama

In the early nineteenth century, Greece was an icon for people of all political persuasions. ‘Il n’y a personne qui ne desire l’emancipation des Grecs’, the conservative Francois Rene Chateaubriand announced in his Note sur la Grece.1 ‘We are all Greeks’, the radical Shelley claimed at the beginning of his poem of liberation, Hellas. The model of Greece was the same and yet it could be appropriated by two very different political factions. As was illustrated in the last chapter, ancient Greece could be seen in two ways. It could be seen as the same, endorsing the British status quo by offering an uninterrupted historical line, imbibed by generations of schoolchildren. Or it could be perceived as different, challenging the understanding to comprehend a remote, old culture. The idea of Greece as the same was comforting to conservative writers, while the idea of it as different was attractive to liberal writers. With these two conflicting interpretations, Greece amounted to a particularly ambiguous metaphor for the political writer. In drawing upon the metaphor, the writer was faced with an underlying concern that the opposing association of Greece would be suggested to the reader, that the radical would be tamed, tinged with vestiges of conservatism, or vice versa.

‘A Flowery Band’: Pastoral, Polemic and Translation

In his ‘Discourse on Pastoral Poetry’ (1709), Alexander Pope argues that the pastoral genre was originally derived from the lazy lifestyle of shepherds in warm climates: “Tis natural to imagine, that the leisure of those early shepherds admitting and inviting some diversion, none was so proper to that solitary and sedentary life as singing; and that in their songs they took occasion to celebrate their own felicity.’1 Keats describes the typical landscape in which those shepherds might be supposed to have lived: Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; and clear rills That for themselves a cooling covert make ‘Gainst the hot season.2 Both writers consciously create a stereotypical locus amoenus, which crucially depends upon simple qualities and pleasures. Shepherds ‘sing’, rivers are ‘clear’ and the world is ‘green’. The enjoyment of the landscape is intensified by its contrast with the supposed complication of everyday life.

‘Grecian Grandeur’: Authority, Tyranny and Fragmentation

Henry Fuseli’s sketch, drawn in the 1770s, entitled ‘An artist in despair over the magnitude of ancient fragments’, is one of the most moving images of Romantic hellenism.1 The drawing depicts a man huddled over and clutching his head in bewilderment and despondency. Beside him are an enormous marble foot and a huge hand, with index finger raised as if issuing a command. The fragmented state of the marble remains is powerful. If this is only the foot, the question raises itself, what must the rest of the sculptured body have looked like? It is little wonder that the artist, attempting to contemplate what is only suggested by the few remaining fragments, experiences what Keats calls a ‘most dizzy pain’. In the previous chapters, I have dwelt on the imaginative possibilities of Greece to liberate and to challenge with its difference. In this chapter, I deal rather with the notion of Greece as authority, as the classical ideal of western culture. Although the imaginary space of Greece at times allowed an erotic construction of difference, it also could imply, as here for Fuseli’s artist, an exemplary magnificence beyond human expression.