Scholars of nineteenth-century classical reception—which examines the afterlife of ancient Greek and Roman history and culture—tend to perceive two different approaches within this growing interdisciplinary field. The first consists of research by critics like Richard Jenkyns, Frank Turner, and David DeLaura, whose foundational works represent classicism as an exclusive site of privilege for the male educated elite. The second includes scholarship by Yopie Prins, Lorna Hardwick, and Isobel Hurst, who have more recently explored how ancient languages and literature facilitated women's innovations of poetic and narrative form, contributions to intellectual history, and inventions of unconventional subjectivities. Shanyn Fiske's Heretical Hellenism offers a nuanced perspective on this latter approach by focusing on women who may have lacked formal training in Greek but who nevertheless gained access to antiquity through its representations in Victorian popular culture or who were quick studies of the ancients but nevertheless expressed anxiety about the insufficiency of their classical learning. These women writers initially encountered ancient Greece not through original texts but rather through widespread translations, adaptations, and commentaries in stage dramas and the periodical press. Such piecemeal, mediated engagements with the Hellenic past could have alienated women from Greek study, but Fiske argues that “its fragmentarity is precisely what constituted Greece's appeal,” for these women could seal the gaps in their knowledge with “heretical” reconstructions of the Greek world that would inspire them to defy masculine authority and even “challenge the foundations of a humanist regime” (19).
Fiske's argument about how the fragmentation of classical learning bred creative and intellectual desire in Victorian women writers and scholars is productive, and the author has herself collected a fascinating assemblage of fragments from her archival research. Fiske is most adept in her close readings of popular magazine articles about the Homeric question, the juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë, the personal correspondence of Jane Ellen Harrison, and early twentieth-century debates about Greek religion. By examining these previously unearthed or otherwise neglected materials, the volume serves as a model for the kind and range of texts that invite greater critical attention in studies of both the nineteenth century and classical reception.
Unfortunately, Fiske's fragmentary method also elicits a desire for greater coherence within the book's chapters. For instance, in the first chapter, Fiske seeks to show how the myth of Medea became “intimately associated with controversies surrounding women's shifting social status” (38), especially debates about divorce, child support, and infanticide. She forges interesting connections between trials of Victorian murderesses and sensationalism on the London stage, as well as between Greek tragedy and Victorian social legislation. However, it is not until the second half of the chapter, which analyzes adaptations of the Medea by Augusta Webster and Amy Levy, that women's “heretical” applications of Greek learning are actually foregrounded. Here, Fiske more relevantly argues that the sorceress of ancient tragedy could be used by the poetess of Victorian England as a critique of sexual double standards by simultaneously representing female victimization and transgression, vulnerability and passion, and marginalization and resilience.
Although ostensibly concerned with Charlotte Brontë's lack of Greek, chapter 2's real interest lies in Fiske's examination of Thomas DeQuincey, who defended the unity of the Homeric epics and explored the relationship of Greek tragedy with literary realism in serialized fragments dispersed throughout Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Fiske hypothesizes that, as a regular reader of the periodical, Brontë used memories of these articles to contest the authority of her French teacher in Brussels, Constantin Heger. That Brontë adapted DeQuincey's ideas in her tutorials—or that the theme of homesickness in her novel Villette can be attributed to commentaries on the Odyssey published in Blackwood’s almost twenty years earlier—is rather speculative. However, Fiske cogently demonstrates that Brontë's analysis of the Electra helped her piece together an aesthetic philosophy that challenged M. Heger's restrictive teachings.
Chapter 3 considers how George Eliot negotiated with fragmented knowledge in the genre of the historical novel. Eliot was not classically trained yet mastered ancient Greek through intensive self-study and had gained the respect of leading male intellectuals, so she “occupied a unique position from which to critique dominant cultural values and assumptions” (116). Fiske argues that in Romola, Eliot adopted Greek historian George Grote's concept of the “mythopoeic imagination … to account for experiences beyond the limits of rational understanding” (138). Unfortunately, the various fragments the chapter attempts to fuse—including the humanist legacy, nationalism, cultural imperialism, historical continuity, and moral sympathy—do not always cohere throughout the analyses of long passages from Eliot's novel about the Renaissance. Fiske's argument is more effective when she examines Eliot's notebook entries responding to Grote's theories and her 1856 essay on the Antigone.
Fiske's discussion of Jane Ellen Harrison in the final chapter and afterword are certainly the project's highlight. As one of the first women classical scholars who was plagued by insecurities about her competence in ancient Greek, Harrison is really the heart of “heretical Hellenism” because of her liminality: she respected traditional philology yet championed the growing science of archaeology, she was both a popular public lecturer and a Cambridge professor, and she privileged creativity and personality as a counterbalance to formal academic analysis. Fiske convincingly maintains that Harrison specialized in archaic religion because her “inadequate linguistic training could be transformed into an epistemology of loss and a rationale for imaginative recovery” (162). Fiske skillfully interweaves a range of relevant texts, including articles on compulsory Greek at the university, Harrison's controversial publications, her critiques of antiquarian colleague M. R. James, and her personal letters to friend and Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray. Fiske poignantly concludes her book by attributing Harrison's fizzled passion for classics to the decline of both “heretical” and conventional Hellenism as a consequence of World War I.
Like Harrison, Fiske exhibits both scholarship and imagination in Heretical Hellenism. As she writes of Harrison's comparative mythology, “fields of knowledge are fertilized by the processes of reception and projection” (186), and Fiske has planted some fruitful seeds of thought in her study of women's responses to the popular and scholarly transmission of Greek literature and culture in Victorian Britain.
