7 Perhaps the most pressing concern for scholars working on
women’s poetic texts is how to situate women poets within a dominant male
literary tradition. A central issue in the majority of the essays here concernsquestions
about the extent to which women’s poetry in Greece and Rome may be
characterized as distinctly “feminine” or at least as “woman-identified,” to
use Diane Rayor’s term (1993). Some of the essays in this collection also raise
questions about the relationship between female-authored poetry and traditional
female speech genres. Other essays focus more on how female poets deviate from
their male counterparts.
More generally, the collection as a whole addresses the
relationship between gender and genre, sexuality and textuality, and implicitly
raises the question as to whether Greek and Roman women may be said to have a
poetic tradition of their own—despite the fragmentary nature of their surviving
poetic texts. Although I do not think it possible to answer that question
definitively given our limited knowledge, I do think the essays here point to a
surprising degree of congruity and complementarity among female authors writing
during vastly different periods.
To be more specific, the women poets treated
in this collection represent a body of work that shows an extraordinary
awareness of literary tradition while at the same time often revealing concerns
that may be described as distinctly feminine. Moreover, many of the essays in
this volume show how women poets in Greece and Rome, through their innovative
reworkings of myth and appropriations of male literary forms, did not merely
imitate the prevailing patriarchy (as some scholars have maintained) but
uncovered their own art forms within established literary genres. Although the
precise dates for many of the authors treated in the collection are either
controversial or uncertain, the essays have been arranged in a loose
chronological fashion. While this arrangement by no means assumes a continuous
line of historical development, it will nonetheless help to clarify influences
where they might exist. In the opening essay of the collection, “Sappho’s
Public World,”
Holt Parker argues against the view common in recent
scholarship that Sappho’s poetry is concerned exclusively with private matters such as weddings and love affairs. Parker cautions, rightly, about the dangers of
projecting onto Sappho notions about an “essentialized” image of woman. While
he acknowledges that what remains of Sappho’s
poetry is primarily concerned with traditionally “feminine” concerns, he argues
that Sappho’s references and allusions to public and political life ought to be
taken into account within the context of her body of work. Parker points out
that Sappho’s concern with defining the noble man, and with ethics in general,
reflects the degree to which the public world of aristocratic values and
friendship is an important component of her poetry.
Like many of the authors in this volume, Parker has clearly
benefited from critical approaches that tend to privilege the feminine in the
texts of Greek and Roman women poets. His essay, however, reflects recent
trends in scholarship that emphasize the interplay in those texts between the
public and the private, the traditional and the innovative. David Larmour’s
essay on Corinna, “Corinna’s Poetic Metis and the Epinikian Tradition,” also
addresses the issue of how Greek women poets appropriate and ultimately
transform aspects of male literary form and conventions. His essay explores how
Corinna’s mythological narratives refashion male traditions of choral lyric—
and diverge from or even react against the poetic mode of Pindar’s Panhellenic
epinikians—as Corinna reworks a Panhellenic perspective, subsuming it within
the local raw material of her poems. Yet Larmour argues that Corinna’s use of
irony and incongruity in her treatment of mythological narrative serves to
challenge, albeit subtly, the conventions of the epinikian mode.