Girls, as Virginia Woolf acknowledged, want rooms of their very own to put in writing. So, too, have ladies writers all through historical past wanted a time period to explain what it’s they do. In How Girls Turned Poets, Emily Hauser rewrites the story of historic Greek literature as one in all gender—redefining the canon as a continuing wrestle for ladies to be heard via, and typically regardless of, gender. She follows historic Greek poets, philosophers, and historians as they developed and debated the vocabulary for authorship on the battleground of gender—and reinserts ladies into the historically all-male canon of Greek literature, arguing for the centrality of their position in shaping concepts round what it means to be an creator.
Why is it vital to reclaim the voices of feminine poets?
EH: Sappho was one of the crucial vital poets (not simply feminine poets: poets) in antiquity: her literary standing surpassed that of most males. But Sappho was in no way the norm for a girl in historic Greece. Most girls lacked the identical type of entry to training that their male friends had; these ladies who did turn into poets struggled to make their voices heard; and the following erasure of their work by the male-ringfenced custom that handed down historic literature, that curated “the Classics” and mentioned what ought to and shouldn’t be learn, marginalized ladies’s writing much more. By delving into the surviving fragments of ladies’s poetry from the traditional world, and what ladies had been saying, in their very own phrases, about what it meant to them to be a poet, I’m making an attempt not solely to provide the feminine poets a voice once more, but additionally to exhibit that they had been truly central individuals within the historic Greek dialog round what it meant to be “a poet”. Though males ended up being seen because the prototypical poets, as a result of authorship (within the West, trying again to classically-inspired fashions) was for lots of of years the province of males, the early years represented a fiercely contested battleground of gender. In different phrases: it didn’t must be this manner.
I do know you’re a author your self: did your expertise of writing as a lady communicate to the way you seemed again to poets like Sappho?
EH: All my writing—each my fiction and non-fiction—focuses on reclaiming the voices of the ladies of the traditional world. So the positionality of my expertise as a lady author within the current is inevitably on my thoughts. I truly had the concept for the ebook throughout a seminar I used to be attending at Oxford on Sappho in 2014—proper across the time I used to be ending my first novel, For the Most Stunning, rewriting the ladies of Homer’s Iliad—and I got here away pondering: what would Sappho have known as herself? I knew Homer had a phrase to speak about his identification as a bard—aoidos, or “male singer”. However did she have any phrases, any area, to acknowledge what she did? This reflection on Sappho’s context and her position in historical past intersected with my journey as a lady and a author, and sparked my contemplation on problems with gender and identification, all the best way again to antiquity.
So is that this only a story about Sappho?
EH: Completely not: though Sappho was the place to begin, I shortly realised, as I got here to put in writing the ebook, that it’s not attainable to speak about ladies in historic literature with out interested by the class of gender extra broadly. This contains the sorts of dichotomies that get arrange, notably in male-authored poetry, the best way males work laborious to assemble the ‘masculinity’ of authorship and reinforce the binary opposition of gender (phrases are for males, not for ladies—a near-perfect quote of a brush-off that Telemachus offers to his mom Penelope close to the opening of Homer’s Odyssey). One of many greatest revelations of the ebook, for me, was that it is a a lot greater story about how we inform the story of gender in phrases: we are able to’t extract gendered identities from the best way we communicate, carry out and write, and the best way that conventional scholarship talks about “the poet” elides the fraught and high-stakes battle that frequently unfolded to form the gendering of literature. So we witness males setting up the edifice of the “male poet” and dealing to make it seem inevitable; playwrights taking part in round with the gender binary and modelling what a nonbinary poet would possibly appear to be; in addition to ladies making an attempt to make their voices heard by utilizing a brand new language to precise their identification.
Are you able to clarify the picture of the chicken on the ebook’s cowl?
EH: It comes from a beautiful wall portray from an historic Bronze Age city at Akrotiri, Santorini. The buildings had been buried underneath the eruption of Santorini’s volcano round 1600 BCE. The portray—extremely well-preserved underneath the thick layer of volcanic ash—exhibits a lush scene of a mountain panorama in spring: blue and pink crags sprouting lilies, with swallows spiralling above. The chicken motif recurs all through the ebook, as a illustration of how males attempt to pigeonhole ladies’s writing and silence their voices (I’m pondering notably of the legend of Philomela, who was raped by her sister’s husband, had her tongue minimize out to cease her talking, and was turned by the gods right into a swallow or, in some accounts, a nightingale). Nevertheless it’s additionally an emblem of how ladies reclaim that picture and switch it into a brand new phrase to explain their very own music: the nightingale is a well known songbird, and the Greek phrase for nightingale, aēdōn, is a female noun that interprets actually as “feminine singer”—a intelligent analogy for a girl poet. The ebook’s cowl, with the chicken flying free out of the phrases that describe her, captures this fantastically.
What do we discover after we learn ‘ladies’ into histories that usually exclude them?
EH: We get a greater, extra correct, extra knowledgeable image of historical past. If we preserve telling a male-oriented historical past of Greek literature, we’ll be fostering a narrative in regards to the historic world that fails to symbolize the voices of all the ladies who sought to be heard. The legacies of that previous, and people methods of gender marginalization, are nonetheless palpable at the moment. Writing extra inclusive histories of historic literature (and meaning all types of inclusivity, whether or not that’s alongside the strains of race, gender, class, or sexuality) means we are able to interrogate the previous and foreground the voices that weren’t heard, within the hopes that they are often now.
Emily Hauser is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Historic Historical past on the College of Exeter, and the creator of the acclaimed Golden Apple trilogy retelling the tales of the ladies of Greek fantasy, together with For the Most Stunning (2016).
