Maud Gonne and the Muses

After much strife and editing, my first (incredibly extensive) annotations/analysis for the site are finished! Huzzah! It should be up by the end of the week, provided that coding isn't too tricky (which hopefully it won't be).

Yeats, like a ton of poets, was pretty preoccupied with women. While Yeats was sort of a ladies' man, that didn't start until his 30s or so. Though he loved and was close with many MANY women, Maud Gonne, an Irish nationalist and actress and all around badass, was his main romantic focus for literally decades. He first met Maud in 1889, and, immediately infatuated both with her beauty and her political leanings, he began developing a lifelong love for her. Many of his poems are about her, ranging from praising to disparaging to despairing. In this way, she is his Muse, the source of focus for his creative energy.

However, Maud isn't a demure and dainty Muse figure. She is full of fire and bite. She is not a wilting flower. She had a long affair with Lucien Millevoye, a French journalist, which resulted in the birth of her daughter Iseult (who I'll get to in a bit). She was English by birth, but got really into the idea of Irish independence and national culture after living in Dublin.

"The world should thank me for not marrying you."

She herself knew how infatuated Yeats was with her, and that he considered her his Muse. She repeatedly rejected his proposals of marriage, replying that the art he created with her inspiration made him happy, even when he protested his misery at being without her. And, let's be real here, she was probably right. Yeats was prolific and a wonderful writer, and having a Muse figure to keep him sexually frustrated uh, inspired? was a good thing for him. 

Maud also completely subverted patriarchal conceptions of Muses, considering herself not the mother but the Father of Yeats' poetry. Really cool, right? 

She married John MacBride, an Irish nationalist, in 1903. Yeats was really pouty about it, to put it likely. The marriage fell apart fairly quickly, and they separated. Maud retained custody of their child, Sean. 

Aside: Now, in 1916, Yeats (still single) proposed to Maud AGAIN, and was rejected AGAIN. But then he notices that Iseult, now 22, is pretty gorgeous, and proposes to her too after "a summer of wooing", whatever that means. (He was rejected.) 

The Muse trope in poetry is common. Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura are just two examples. But the Muse is often a passive figure, an object of adoration, seen from afar and not necessarily conversed with. Yeats and Maud were genuinely very close, corresponding for decades even when they were apart and often working together on building up the Irish national culture they both valued. The reason Maud is so valuable as a Muse is because of her activity---she was vivacious and passionate and Yeats knew her very well.

Overall, Maud was ridiculously independent, talented, and intelligent, which is ultimately what captivated Yeats and gave her the title of his Muse. 

Honey-smiling Sappho: a word on women in Greece.

I've been thinking a lot about the perception of women, mostly in a modern context. But, once again, I realize that whatever modern thing I'm thinking about inevitably has deep seated roots. Doing research on Sappho this week, I was pretty dismayed by the scholarship and disappointed in the oblique sexism both from her contemporaries and modern commentators. 

Sappho, the most famous Greek poetess (which is not to say she was the only one), lived on the island of Lesbos from around 630 BCE to her death in 570 BCE, with a brief time of exile during a tumultuous political climate. Very little of her poetry survives, but that which does is incredibly beautiful. The Alexandrians considered her one of the nine great lyric poets; unsurprisingly, she is the only woman on the list. However, she is most famous for her sexual preferences, which have been sensationalized. Perhaps this is due to the dearth of her original text that survives, but I think there's more to it than that. 

Sappho was apparently ugly according to Greek standards. As far as I can tell, 'ugly' means 'dark'. Another more complimentary contemporary called her "violet-haired", so we can assume she is at minimum not golden-haired or pale-skinned. She was also small, another apparent strike against her. But an epithet that was attributed to her by the same friend who called her "violet-haired" was mellichomeide - "honey-smiling".

I think this is a beautiful word and a beautiful concept, but there is also an undertone of male condescension that makes me deeply sad. Men are allowed to be diverse in their descriptors: strong, brilliant, kind, wise, a great poet. But Sappho? Well, she isn't pretty, but at least she's sweet. Beauty and kindness, while good enough things, should not be what Sappho is reduced to because she's a woman. Back to modern times, girls and women are frequently told that "they're prettier when they smile". That's not cool. You don't have the right to try and dictate my happiness or my emotions, or try to make me fake a smile because it makes me more visually appealing. I have thoughts, and sometimes these thoughts do not make me smile, and forcing me or anyone else to create some facsimile of happiness is not your right.

Honey-smiling Sappho may have been sweet, but that is not all she was. Sappho was a powerful writer who captured love, companionship, and life, regardless of who she slept with. And so, I end with this. 

Sappho,  fragment 58 (trans Mary Barnard)

Pain penetrates
me drop
by drop

A lot has been done physically on the website this week, which is exciting. Accepting the caveat that it most places on the site are inaccessible to viewers at this time, here is the link. Please please PLEASE let me know if there's something that jumps out at you as a. wrong, or b. unergonomic. We really want this to be sleek and easy to use.

http://www.antiquityinireland.org 

Thank you in advance for any advice! 

Digital Humanities and Yeats Poems and Classics, OH MY!

Okay. I'm a terrible blogger. I'm radically inconsistent and very rarely am I insightful. But I'm finally doing something that's pretty cool and I'm very excited about and hopefully will be a long range project.

The basic story arc begins with an email I received over Presidents' Day weekend in February. I was at the Museum of Science with my visiting family, messing around on my phone, when a Classics professor sent out a message to me and a few other undergrads about a digital humanities summer research project with the Classics Dept. and the Irish Studies Dept. I promptly frothed at the mouth and sent back an email roughly equivalent to, "Oh my god yes please I want to please please yes", and began the research application.

BU has a really great summer program called UROP that encourages and pays undergrads to do research. I, like many others, was aware of UROP, but dismissed it as a scientific/lab based program, which it mostly is, to be fair. (Example: my brilliant roommate for the past year did UROP last year working with baby rat heart cells to figure out what makes them die. Lots of science involved. I know she had to pipette a lot of things and dissect a lot of rats.) Humanities Research, while certainly very real, didn't seem like a UROP concern.

But, lo and behold, another classics major and I applied for a digital humanities project and were accepted together. Our basic premise is to create a compiled online academic resource on classical allusions in Irish literature. (No small task, we know.) Sarah, my partner in crime, is specializing in James Joyce, while I'm working on the poetry of W.B. Yeats. We want our website to be a dialogue between the reader and the text, with additional insights and comments added by scholars around the world.

The "digital" part of the digital humanities has been an adventure thus far. The Digital Humanities movement, for lack of a better term, is really cool. It's all about integrating technology with the stereotypically technologically stunted fields of the humanities. This can be anything from databases, archives, digitizing important documents to make them accessible all around the world. The focus is really on making various texts, pictures, and other media available to scholars who can learn from and interact with them.

Knowing basically very little about computer programming and website design, we started two weeks ago from the ground up. We were initially using a database site called Omeka, which is a wonderful platform that is great for creating digital archives of pictures and other media. The problem with Omeka for us, though, was that we are primarily working with texts rather than images. Sure, we want to get manuscript images involved (if copyright allows, which has been a thorny beast thus far), but our primary sources and our own analysis are made of words rather than images.

We're now working on setting up a Wordpress hosted site, which will give us the ability to get into the guts of the website and redesign it with our growing knowledge of HTML, CSS, and tiny bits of Javascript. We really want the site to be useful and informational, but also beautiful. The annotations that we make will pop up as mouseover text, noting that Yeats references Helen and Menelaus in such-and-such poem, and that he uses Irish mythology as a framework for his early works, and so on.

It's exciting. It's confusing. And we're working really hard to make an ergonomic and insightful,  analytical and digital piece of work. Wish us luck. More to come.

It Matters.

On Wednesday, I gave an hour lesson on the Trojan War to my 6th graders as background on the Odyssey, and it was absolutely great. I can't take all of the credit, because they were incredibly responsive and attentive and I was so involved in the conversation with them. 

I asked them what they knew about the war, and they said a bunch of really great stuff. One girl told me the entire story of the Judgement of Paris with comprehensive detail. Others told of the Trojan Horse, thought up by Odysseus, who they thought was the best thing since sliced bread. A few even mentioned Achilles, Paris, and Hector's deaths. 

But when I put everything on a timeline, they realized that "nothing happened" in the middle of the war and we had a really great discussion about how that would feel for an average soldier and how exhausting that would be. We talked about why the war wasn't really about Helen but about Troy's wealth. 

Once I got to the actual events of the Iliad and the end of the war, they were awestruck. You could hear a pin drop after Hector's death, and it was so beautiful that it hurt. They understood why Achilles was so horrible to Hector's body but didn't agree with him. They were so involved in the story. They completely got it.

And at the end, once we'd talked a lot about whether or not Odysseus and Achilles were good people or good warriors or good heroes, I asked them one more question. 

"Why are we reading this book? Why does this matter? This is 3500 years old, it's old news!" 

A girl raised her hand and said, "We can know their stories and make them fit to the modern day. And we can learn from their morals." 

I repeated what she said slowly, then asked the students when they were born. 

"2000, 2001", came the answers. I contemplated that for a minute, relishing the theatricality of my classroom presence for a moment. 

"The Iraq War has been going on for basically your entire lives. Imagine you were born in Troy at the beginning of the war. You haven't lived a single part of your life without this War defining it." I could see they were a little confused. 

"There are children in Iraq who are your age who have no memory of anything before the war. They are the Trojans. We're the Greeks."

It clicked. They were floored. They completely got it.

"And that's why we read these books and tell these stories. Because it's still happening."

Class ended. It was beautiful. I felt really great, and my cooperating teacher was incredibly impressed. He told me that, out of the 5 student teachers he'd had, this lesson was by far the best because I was invested in what I was talking about. He told me that one student, at the end, turned around to him and said, "Wow, that was EMOTIONAL."

Everything I've learned through being in the classroom has been hard won. I've graded tests where half the class has failed. I've watched my teacher get so frustrated by the disrespect of the class that he can't do anything else. I've had another young teacher urge me away from urban education, looking me straight in the eyes and saying, "It's blood money, don't take it." I've struggled with a disconnect between me and my students, no matter how hard I try. I've felt like a failure when I try to break through a student who I know is smart but is partially illiterate and refuses to do his geography work. And it's been really hard.

But as my teacher said, "The grading and lesson plans and stuff come with experience. What really matters is your ability to get up in front of a class and engage and talk to them. And you can do that."

It was really great. And I'm glad that it matters. 

Durate.

As my school year starts up again, I face a few challenges.

I am adjusting to an admittedly beautiful new apartment. I will be cooking my own meals, which means that no matter how tired I am, I am responsible for feeding myself. Not an actual hardship, but one that will take some getting used to. My class schedule is 4 hours of class straight on my least strenuous day, ballooning to 6 straight. On Wednesdays, I'll be observing in a classroom and helping out for the full, 7am-3pm school day with an age group that I will not be teaching in my "real life" (very loose term).

In Greek this semester, we're translating the Gospel of John and some Herodotus. Having forgotten my Greek this summer, this will definitely end in tears and a lot of frustration. I technically have no language requirement so this is sort of optional, and yet I continue.

I'm trying out for one theatre troupe, and maybe directing or trying out for another.

Not to mention that, theoretically, I'm supposed to have a social life. (LOL JK. I'm pretty much a hermit, but at least my friends are hermits, too.)

Now, this may just seem like unstructured, vaguely classically-themed bitching, but I promise I have a point.

Why do this? Why suffer through a semester of Herodotus? Why work so hard? Yes, to get a good education, but I'm not quite noble enough to work so hard if that is the only reason.

There are things I want to do.

I want to translate part of the Odyssey and the Iliad, because they have changed my life. I want to understand language and the little quirks and foibles of translation. I want to be accessible as a teacher, and convey information and meaning.

What do I have to do to get to this end goal?

Durate (dur-AH-tay). To expand on that? "Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis." Aeneas says this in his first major speech to his men after they've been through severe storms and are shipwrecked on Carthage's coast.  They've lost several ships and many friends. But he tells them: "Endure, and save yourselves for other things."

I tend to think that Aeneas is a pretty shitty leader, but that's my personal opinion. And, within context, this line makes it sound like he's saying that eventually, once Rome is founded and they're all happy and safe, they'll look back on this and laugh. Even without my bias, Aeneas is telling them to shove their grief away until a better time, when they have distance and can heal their wounds.

As a psychological tactic, this leaves much to be desired. Bottling emotions is really never productive for more than an infinitesimal period of time. But the message of "endure" is something that I've latched onto.

I can endure some Herodotus (whom I have no specific ire towards) to get to my Homer class next semester. I can work with some middle schoolers so I can help their older counterparts in high school. And really, I'll probably end up liking these classes, in spite of the workload and all of my whining.

In either case, I'll get through this semester and have a great time. And I hope you all will, too. Durate, friends.

Medea and Catharsis

Today, I saw a production of Euripides' Medea at the Actor's Shakespeare Project in Cambridge. It was phenomenal, incredibly scary in the right places and overall an emotional punch in the face. Jason, of "and the Argonauts" fame, wants to leave his sorceress wife for a young princess Glauce, even though he has two sons already by Medea. He tries to make her believe that he is marrying to provide security, that their sons will have princes for brothers and they will always have a place to live in comfort. Medea, outraged, rails against the princess and her father, Creon, who banishes her from Corinth in fear that she will seek revenge. In the day allotted to her to gather means for herself and her boys to survive on, she plots and carries out the murders of Creon and Glauce, arranges for a safe home in Athens with the king Aegeus, and finally, cutting off her nose to spite her face, kills her children so that Jason will be cursed, heirless, and alone. She flies off in the Chariot of the Sun in cold, bloody, satiated triumph.

Again, I read Medea last year. There was an extremely passionate debate about whether or not Medea was justified, why Jason could cast her out, and who we sympathized with. (An account of this discussion can be found on Ms. Laudadio's blog.) At the time, I was frustrated by how angry everyone was getting. I remember distinctly that I almost cried, simply because everyone was yelling and no one could give quarter.

You see, Medea polarizes. You either believe Medea is justified in the murder of her enemies and her children, or you feel so deeply for Jason that it wipes out the injustices he deals out. I was very conflicted, but tended to be on the Jason side. I couldn't, and still can't, imagine the intense pain he feels when he screams out as his losses sink in. However, I recognized Medea's points. As a woman, she had no political sway. She was brushed aside by Jason with little care, and she was banished with no means to support herself. She had to think quickly. Let it be known that her temper was out of control, but she was also clever, even brilliant. Even if she could live as an exile, her boys would be in constant danger of death from Corinthians, who would want Jason's heirs to be from Glauce. To Medea, for whom humility and subservience is not an option, this is the only way.

Today, seeing it acted out, everything was flipped. I have never loathed Jason so much as when he entered and passionately kissed Medea. His justifications for marrying Glauce were pandering and inane. The actress who played Medea was also pregnant, adding another layer of outraged anguish to the story; not only was Jason abandoning the two sons he knew, he was cutting off his unborn child. Then, as the play went on, I found that I couldn't agree with Medea's choice.

The murders of Glauce and Creon were somewhat justified, but her children, two dear boys dressed in superhero pajamas, brought it a little too close to home for me. The perfectly acted trio of Chorus women tried desperately to persuade Medea that it was too much to kill her sons, that the gods hated those who slaughtered their kin, that hurting Jason wasn't worth the pain she would feel. Indeed, she backs down for a moment, but the next moment acts like a woman possessed. In the end, the deed is done. The children cry out for their Mother to spare them, and the Chorus women keen, swiftly breaking my heart. Jason is irreparably broken, and Medea is impassive, her children bloody at her feet. I feel that I understand Medea, but I cannot agree with her. She values her pride over everything else, and will not be defeated.

Catharsis is a really big thing in Greek tragedy. At the yearly festival of Dionysus, where plays were performed, everyone would watch these plays that told the stories of familiar myths. They would empathize. They would see themselves in the characters. They would weep. And, at the end of the festival, they would pick up and get on with their lives, despite and because of the stories they had witnessed.

Catharsis isn't an ancient thing, though; it's a human thing. We still do it. We watch Nascar for the crash, we see Paranormal Activity to feel the terror of being murdered in a safe and socially acceptable context. We are the murderer, the murdered, the slighted woman, the grieving father, all without leaving our seat. Catharsis is important for the stability of a society, particularly in Athens. It gets out the monsters within, blanches and purges, and lays you out to dry as the lessons slowly sink in.

Emotionally compromised, I took the T home, had dinner, and saw an improv show with my friends. Just like the Greeks, I needed a satyr play to calm me down and help me go from monster to human once more.

Erinyes to Eumenides

I'll be honest. I read the Oresteia last year, but I didn't finish it. I think it had something to do with the fact that I was busy trying to apply to an Ivy League school and the resulting constant panic that caused. Noelia, Carrie, and I, in a typical Classics Academy move, read half of the first play on the day it was due while walking around our track during gym class. It may have been a day in advance, but I doubt it. We were all swamped.

Aeschylus follows the return from Troy of Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Greek army, universally hailed in Greek lit as a really big asshole. Before the Trojan War even started, he fucked up and boasted that he was a better shot than Artemis, goddess of the hunt. She demanded that he sacrifice his eldest daughter, Iphigenia, or else the ships couldn't even leave port. He does this, in various versions either gagging the girl so she couldn't scream or lying to her, saying she was going to marry Achilles, and sails away to Troy. For ten years. He returns to his country triumphant, bringing along a Trojan concubine Cassandra, and his wife Clytemnestra (or Clytaemnestra, the Greeks love their vowels) kills both he and Cassandra in the bath. During the war, she took a lover, Agamemnon's cousin Aegisthus, to spite him. A lot of shit happens in their family, so basically the death of Agamemnon is just a further step in this curse. Many years pass, and in the second play their son Orestes grows up and (with a little help from his sister Electra), avenges his father's death by killing his mother and their lover. In the third play, Orestes is hounded by the Furies, pre-Olympian earth goddesses of maternal vengeance who demand his sacrifice. Through a trial spearheaded by Athena and Apollo, with a jury of Athenian citizens, Orestes is acquitted of the murder. The Furies, recognizing a sudden power shift, submit to Athena and sublimate their power into hers in order to survive.

This trilogy seems generally ordinary, if you can make any generalizations based on the pithy amount of Greek drama that survives to this day. It is a mythological story, centered around characters well known from the Trojan War. Its subject matter isn't unique; both Sophocles and Euripides wrote other plays about Agamemnon's brood, particularly Electra and Iphigenia. So, you have to ask: why is this trilogy weird?

First: I found out very recently that this is the only trilogy ever written to be performed as a unified set. Everyone's read Sophocles' Oedipus Cycle, but those plays were written out of order, several years apart. They aren't a cohesive trilogy like Aeschylus' is. They were all performed at the same festival (with the traditional fourth play, a satire, unfortunately lost). This trilogy is intentionally a tour de force. Keeping the same characters and storyline, rather than a series of fragmented stories, gives you a chance to root for one character or the other, and it makes the emotion even more powerful. Even when you know the ending to the story, you want to see exactly how everything plays out.

Second: Though he's not a rabid feminist like Euripides, Aeschylus gives an intentionally uneven view of women, stirring up both strong empathy and revulsion, notably Clytemnestra in Agamemnon and the Furies in The Eumenides.

Clytemnestra is coldly rational, planning the death of her arrogant and completely insensitive husband. When I recently reread the trilogy in class, a few people argued that Agamemnon was only doing what he had to do in order to go off to war. I fell back on the strident feminist aspects of Clytemnestra's nature, and how Agamemnon is helpless in the face of her machinations, as well as Agamemnon's utter repulsiveness as a human being. She's had murderous rage brewing for ten years, unable to mourn her daughter properly because of the injustice of her sacrifice and the fact that no one around her seemed to realize how much she hurt.

However, being entirely sympathetic with Clytemnestra doesn't hold. In my mind, she is completely justified in her murder of Agamemnon due to the extreme grief she harbors for Iphigenia, as well as for the 'normal' life that has been completely scrapped by the war. However, her murder of Cassandra is due to petty jealousy, collateral damage to her vengeance. And when we move on to the second play, she is radically unhinged. She is demonized. On hearing of Orestes' supposed death, she smiles, thinking that she is finally safe in her position as queen. The Clytemnestra of the Libation Bearers is more ruthless, seeing ghosts that needle her guilty conscience to the breaking point. After her death, she appears in the Eumenides to urge the Furies on to avenge her. This appearance, even in ghost form, makes her the only character to appear in all three plays, which in itself is a powerful statement by Aeschylus. But really, what do we think of her by the end? She is not avenged; Orestes walks free. I think that in a modern day trial she would be convicted of premeditated murder but released due to insanity. Clytemnestra's grief drives her past all rational action, and everything that she does is based on seeking justice for those wrongs.

You may have noticed, clever reader, that I've used variations on the word "revenge" and "justice" so frequently that they're practically every other word. To help with the precision of the term, let us define these enigmatic concepts. Revenge is fairly easy: to the House of Atreus, revenge is direct retribution. An eye for an eye, a son's death for a son's death. Agamemnon and Cassandra, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. It has a certain symmetry until Orestes is released from the cycle.

Justice is a really slippery, malleable force in the trilogy. It can be used as a placeholder for any of the characters' motivations. Clytemnestra seeks justice for Iphigenia. Orestes seeks justice for Agamemnon. The Furies seek justice for Clytemnestra. Apollo, who is on Orestes' side, seeks justice that will work out in his favor. Athena, the head of the trial, is really the only one who has a slightly fair concept of justice. She wants the truth, and if Orestes has a good enough reason for why he killed his mother, she's willing to tell the Furies to lay off.

Apollo uses a ton of bullshit arguments to say why Clytemnestra isn't really Orestes' mother, the most absurd being that the woman is only the vessel for the child because the husband "mounts" (anyone who has a vague concept of biology can rightly raise their eyebrows). Orestes has a few solid points. He says (correctly) that Apollo would make his life miserable if he didn't avenge Agamemnon's death. He calls on the conflict he felt when preparing to murder her; he did not act on emotion only, but also from a sense of duty. And he is highly respectful, looking Athena straight in the eye and saying, "Yeah, I killed her. But this is why."

The Furies have several strong arguments, calling Apollo out on how stupid he's being, and are enraged at the verdict that lets Orestes go free. But, almost on a dime, they begin to look at Athena as a potential partner rather than an enemy. They see that they have, shockingly, been defeated in their own domain by these new, upstart Olympian gods. The Furies aren't dumb. They know that the world is changing. They see Athena's offer of a place in the new system of gods, and while they will be far less powerful, they will still be there. Everyone will know and fear them. So they suddenly grovel at Athena's feet, dancing around her in happiness. They go from being Erinyes (furies) to being Eumenides (kindly ones).

What does this say about Aeschylus' view on women? He obviously realizes that they can be cunning and brilliant and powerful, but in the end their power is consumed into the giant machine that is the patriarchal society. Where once cthonic earth goddesses ruled supreme, male Olympians can boss around the most powerful avengers of slighted women.

Long story short, I'd say that it's complicated.