Jennifer Wallace. Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism
Journal article by Hugo Donnelly; Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 41, 2002
Journal Article Excerpt
Jennifer Wallace. Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism. by Hugo Donnelly Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Pp. 261. In this highly informative book, Jennifer Wallace argues that the assimilation of Hellenic classicism into British culture was a relatively late phenomenon. The excavation of Pompeii, a city founded as a Greek colony, stimulated from the mid-eighteenth century onwards a widespread interest in the factual details of the Greek way of life, and a growing demand for cultural information. Two events at the beginning of the nineteenth century heralded the institutionalization of Hellenism within the British establishment, and the supremacy of Greece over Rome as a cultural and aesthetic llmodel. Between 1801 and 1806 Lord Elgin removed all the statues from the Parthenon and shipped them back to England to improve British taste, and in 1807 Oxford introduced classical degree examinations. An appreciation of Greece and its culture was now seen as essential to the moral education of the young, as well as being an aesthetic touchstone for artists and sculptors. This iconic appropriation of Greece, however, coincided with the tumultuous and destabilizing forces of British romanticism, whose main political thrust was a resistance to any centralized cultural image. Wallace delves into the cauldron of dissent and reaction in the period to reveal the perilous instability of a unified Hellenistic model. Images of Greece, she argues, were not natural or given, but imagined, or consciously created to serve particular interests. For the sentimentalists, seeking a temporary asylum from the ills of life, Greece was a kind of pastoral theme-park, "all soft delight," in Keats's phrase, with beautiful statuary adorning mythical landscapes. The Greeks represented the innocent childhood of western civilization, an exemplary race living in the dewy freshness of the world's dawn, carrying on uncomplicated yet prodigiously cultured lives. For the politically conservative, identification with Greece provided an unproblematic endorsement of national values and concerns. Athenian democracy was likened to the British constitution, while the burgeoning imperial mentality at home was strengthened and mollified by Hellenistic models. The Greeks, after all, were empire-builders who distinguished their superior character from those they colonized. They even invented xenophobia by coining the term barbarian for all those who lived beyond their national boundaries. Opposition to Hellenism came from radicals such as Cobbett and Paine, who argued that a classical education underlined social divisions and served to enforce class differences. Knowledge of Greek was an instant benchmark to social background, a fashionable accessory that marked the user off as privileged and elitist. It was also diversionary, shielding young men, as Godwin argued, from the realities of life. To immerse oneself in the details of a past culture was a displacement activity which allowed one to ignore those real political changes and anxieties that were occurring at the time. It is Shelley, however, who provides Wallace with her point of focus for romantic ambivalence towards Greece. Shelley had a solid grounding in the classics, and spent his life reading and translating Greek literature, philosophy and history. Yet his constant "rethinking" of Hellenism, which gives this book its subtitle, reveals some contorted logic. "We are all Greeks," he declared in his Preface to Hellas: "Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their roots in Greece." Yet he found the politics of Greece to be "oppressive and arbitrary," similar in spirit to that political oppression which coincided with the peak years of his own literary career. In other moods he was attracted to the sensual allure of Greece. Under this aspect, Greece was a pagan, Arcadian world of pleasure and sexual license, which challenged the British system of rules, orthodoxy and oppression. In various essays he celebrated a Greek paganism revelling in freedom and uninhibited erotic charm, as opposed to the gloomy and authoritarian cast of Christianity. There was also a feminist agenda in this positioning of Hellas as Other. As women were excluded from formal education, a knowledge of Greek could be seen as subversive, a rite of passage to a forbidden world of intellectual and sexual freedom, and Wallace finds this process dramatized in Queen Mab. Greek, with its suggestively eastern exoticism, also seemed appropriate to describe the exciting strangeness of illicit love, and in his letters to Mary Godwin Shelley coined Greek words as a lovers' code, thus pointing up the voluptuously eastern associations of the language.Wallace's reading of Alastor in this light, however, depends on her rather loose argument that Greece and the East were imaginatively interchangeable ... |
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