Fiona Cox Sibylline Sisters: Virgil’s Presence in ContemporaryWomen’s Writing Sibylline Sisters: Virgil’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing . Fiona Cox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. ix+284.
2014; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 112; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/675962
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeFiona Cox Sibylline Sisters: Virgil’s Presence in ContemporaryWomen’s Writing Sibylline Sisters: Virgil’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Fiona Cox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. ix+284.Sarah SpenceSarah SpenceUniversity of Georgia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis exciting book addresses a seemingly simple question: What role does Vergil play in contemporary women’s writing? The answer, however, is anything but simple. The truth is that quietly, insistently, Vergil has made his way into the imaginations of many women authors recently, although the reasons for his increased popularity are diverse. The authors studied are Ruth Fainlight, Eavan Boland, Michèle Roberts, Margaret Drabble, A. S. Byatt, Christa Wolf, Monique Wittig, Joyce Carol Oates, Janet Lembke, and Ursula Le Guin. The authors, in other words, are from both sides of the Atlantic, writers of prose and poetry, most, but not all, writing in English.Early on in the text the author notes that “Dido has become less popular in general in the twentieth century” (15 n. 54). This is an important observation, since Vergil’s relationship to women is often filtered through the tragic story of Dido. Yet what these authors find here, according to Fiona Cox, is anything but tragic. Instead, it is Vergil’s linking of nationalism with exile and his tools for empowerment under adverse conditions that draw women authors to him. Cox does note that “there is, of course, a paradox inherent in the fact that Virgil is both hailed as the Father of a literary tradition that has been so set upon silencing and excluding the voices of women and invoked in order to help women articulate their sense of exclusion and exile” (13). Beginning with a discussion of Hélène Cixous in the introduction, Cox moves to Ruth Fainlight, who “is heralded as a Sibyl rather than condemned as a Cassandra” (67). Probing her identity as Jewish daughter and woman poet, Fainlight draws on Vergil to sing of mourning and loss, “both personal and historical” (67). But Fainlight also, Cox argues, turns to Vergil to sing of more feminine things: the loss of her beauty, the change and disintegration of her body through aging (63–64). This ability of Vergil to give voice to topics traditionally underrepresented is a theme Cox follows in several of the authors considered: Eavan Boland, for instance, turns to Vergil as an author who “shapes not only the discourse that probes the schisms between colonizer and colonized but also helps her, as a woman, to give voice to a centuries-old silencing. In her hands, Virgil sings, not of arms and the man, but of a fragile and tentative peace articulated in the newborn tones of an Irish woman poet” (95). Boland uses Vergil to sing of her place between two worlds, using classical myth to counter the Yeatsian mythologies she grew up with.Michèle Roberts invokes Vergil at moments of grief, often reading him through the lens of Proust. The Sibyl plays a large part in Roberts’s own mythology, as for Fainlight, although for Roberts the sibyls reject death and inhabit libraries like wanderers, waiting for the chance to haunt “a new generation of readers” (113). Margaret Drabble and A. S. Byatt seem unlikely spots to find Vergil, yet the language of loss he provides help each construct her narrative. In Drabble, Cox insightfully finds reference to Vergil’s pilgrims, “plotting a journey that has hitherto been mapped exclusively by men” (134). Byatt’s dense intertextuality leads time and again to the Aeneas who quests for a new identity, as her characters search for a sense of self in the war-torn London of her stories. In one, The Little Black Book of Stories (2003), Vergil offers language for the isolation of an Alzheimer’s sufferer and partner. The characters, Mado and James Ennis, Cox suggests, echo the names and tales of Dido and Aeneas with no hope of a future and the understanding of the past unraveling in a meaningless and chaotic fashion. The Aeneid offers a means of escape to James, even as it offers a description of entrapment to Mado (who comes to call herself Dido). Cox is at her best here, as she turns not just to Vergil to explain the subtext of this tale but also, strikingly, to the number of references made to Vergil in accounts of the Blitz of 1944 (see esp. 143–44).Christa Wolf is perhaps the best known Vergilian-inspired author of the collection, but it does no harm to be reminded of the ways in which she responds to his poetry. Her character is of course Cassandra, and the “image of remembered Troy superimposed upon the ruins in front of her serves as a reminder…of the richness of multiplicity, of various identities” (165). Monique Wittig, known for her reworking of canonical texts, likewise is an anticipated member of this group, speaking “on behalf of marginalized sections of society such as women and children” (182). Like Wolf, Wittig focuses on Cassandra; unlike Wolf, Wittig’s understanding of Vergil is often filtered through Dante, as her landscape is largely that of the underworld. As a result, she moves beyond Vergil in the projection of the future, a paradisical view anchored by the plenitude of language, a Dantean, not Vergilian, conceit.The three American authors the book ends with, Joyce Carol Oates, Janet Lembke, and Ursula Le Guin, each draws on the two voices of the Aeneid, that of empire and that of loss, to comment on the political scene of America today. In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, Oates turns to Vergil, drawing on a national myth that posits the United States as the latest descendant of the Trojans, now under attack. Also involved is the centrality of immigration to Oates’s national myth, with its concomitant themes of loneliness and exclusion. Lembke, who translated the Georgics in 2005, Cox contrasts to Oates: “While…Oates uses Virgil to explore the dangers facing the United States from the divided social factions at the heart of the community, Lembke’s concern is to alert us to the irreversible damage caused to the landscape by government policies that have been driven by material gain and have resulted in both dispossession and climate change” (231). For this she turns to the Georgics, not the Aeneid, although the use of Vergil to represent the underrepresented remains consistent. Ursula Le Guin’s 2008 novel Lavinia offers voice to the most strikingly silent heroine ever; as a science fiction writer Le Guin moves across time in representing the dimensions of this figure. As a result, Cox argues, the Aeneid creates its own futures in the hands of Le Guin, even as we focus on a character “who has been forced to witness the outrage of finding her homeland…colonized by the invading Trojan army, so that the aching loss behind the Eclogues and Georgics finds a resonance here also” (248).Cox concludes that these authors give and find voice in the strikingly silent female characters of Vergil, as well as the causes that Vergil has come to represent, including dangers of imperialism and threats to nation and landscape. She acknowledges that “the Virgils inherited by these women are mediated through canonical writers who have shaped their own country’s literature while themselves conversing with the works of Virgil” (267) as they draw Vergil through the literary tradition rather than considering him in his Latin context. He is read in the context of Tennyson, of Proust, most often of Dante; the insertion of the courtliness of Beatrice into the Vergilian narrative would seem to provide entry into the text in a way that Dido, and all the dead males who people the Aeneid, does not. Yet, Cox suggests, “what marks out these Virgilian women is their isolation, their separation, not just from male-dominated history, but from each other.…If we adopt Steiner’s view that the works of Homer and Virgil serve as a mirror in which each generation, each society, can find its preoccupations and anxieties reflected, then at the beginning of the twenty-first century these concerns are addressed in the works of the Father of the West by a chorus of female voices, calling out to each other across temporal and geographical boundaries in a refashioning and re-creation of the Western tradition” (269).The complement to this argument, Virgil’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Scholarly Writing, has yet to be written. It is a striking fact that there are few women who make Vergil their main scholarly focus. Christine Perkell and Eleanor Leach are two early exceptions to this, but compared to the number of male classicists who write primarily on Vergil, their number is surprisingly small. The reasons for this are illuminated by the findings of Cox: the Vergil that inspires the women writers she considers is not the mainstream Vergil found in the scholarship. This too is changing, however, and as the understanding and interpretation of what Vergil might have been interested in and trying to achieve in his writings shifts to questions of fairness, imperialism, and poetry, more women scholars seem to be finding in Vergil a poet that captures their attention. A recent conference at the Villa Vergiliana suggested just such a trend, with the numbers of rising Vergilian stars including as many women as men and the questions asked of the text not those of arms or men but humanity. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 112, Number 1August 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/675962 Views: 264Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Charles Martindale, Fiachra Mac Góráin The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, 8 (Jul 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316756102
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