Mythic Voices: Allusions to Ancient Greece in the Poetics of Augusta Webster

Mythic Voices: Allusions to Ancient Greece in the Poetics of Augusta Webster

Words by Alexandra Dominica

Regarded by Christina Rossetti as ‘by far the most formidable woman poet’, the works of Augusta Webster have found little revival over the last century, appearing briefly in a handful of articles, journals and anthologies. Webster, despite often being consigned to literary obscurity, possesses a sonorous and resonantly inexorable voice. It is clear through Webster’s poetic resurrection of female mythological figures that her translation of Euripides’ Medea, revived and reinvigorated a dark tale of female tragedy. With the adoption and full integration of Hellenism into British culture, the Victorians witnessed a series of revivals of Greek culture in the artistic mediums, such as sculpture, architecture, painting and poetry – of course all wryly gendered. Webster’s ‘Medea in Athens’ embodies a mythological figure as a form of using voice as agency and female empowerment. Webster claims  a grasp of the Hellenic tradition and reclaims it from the hands of the classically-educated Victorian gentry. As a Victorian poet and political activist for the rights of women, Webster also wrote ‘Circe’ as a part of her collection Portraits (1870), bringing the witch of Homer’s Odyssey out of the 19th century gallery and into public discussion. Webster, by using the personas of Medea and Circe, rejects the traditional Victorian construction of the feminine and engages in a strikingly modern discourse of pro-sexuality. Through this, she transcends the canon; the previous use of female personae in historical, sexually androcentric poetry. 

The genre of the dramatic monologue was a popular choice within Robert Browning’s school of poetry; some male poets constructed female personae such as D. G Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’ (1850) or Tennyson’s ‘The Death of Oenone’ (1832), others conventionally represented female desire through male personae such as Browning’s popularised ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (1836). These representations of female sexuality were usually within social prescriptions of chastity. However in ‘Medea in Athens’ Webster uses a highly controversial female figure in Greek myth; a volatile yet highly intelligent ‘barbarian’ princess. Following a tradition of divine retribution, Medea murders her own children in a cold-blooded frenzy. Since then a term has been coined to define such a relationship in psychiatry. The term ‘The Medea Complex’ has been coined by those such as E.S Stern and more recently, Robert Tyminski. However as Tyminski claims, it is not simply maternal and paternal roles that are considered in Medea’s filicide, but it can also be examined through intertextual and universal depictions of the ‘dangerous feminine’ as ‘foreign queen.’ Furthermore the term ‘Medea Complex’, is of course a male construction: Therefore it is problematic in itself. Webster draws attention to the danger and conceit in using conventional labels, for example the anaphoric “Am I no happy wife?” thus ironicising domesticity with her wit and poetic devices. The use of such intertextual resources within 19th century poetry is a discussion that assumes the strain of feigned femininity, expressing it through the voices of the sorceress and the witch.

‘Medea in Athens’ is one of a collection of dramatic monologues written in blank verse, others being ‘Circe’ and ‘A Castaway’. None of which saw much recognition in the preceding century, perhaps due not only to sexual prejudice in literary hierarchies but to the popularity of expressing the inner self, as displayed in the works of Arnold and Tennyson. Webster’s poetry reflects not only an individual, but a collective voicing of sentiments and views on the suffocating ideals of womanhood, namely domesticity, submission, devotion and purity. Here the magical sorceresses of myth are de-mythologised and brought to contemporary light, enfranchised within modern concerns and poetic forms. Luu describes Webster’s creations as ‘female grotesques’; that are ‘characterised by a specifically feminine excess,’ such female bodies are unapologetically sexual. However Luu’s term ‘grotesques’ and ‘enfreakment’ would imply that Webster’s Portraits as exhibiting these women in a carnivalesque freak show. These labels are unconvincing as Webster utilises the idea of ‘spectacle’ through the dramatic-I; she does this to critique the near-egotism of self-reflection in Victorian poetry, instead providing forthright commentary on women’s place in the nation’s political fabric. Nonetheless, parts of Luu’s argument despite such terminology is helpful, as she navigates the small pool of criticism these poems have collected. Luu’s gallery of ‘grotesques’ are in fact more comparable to a hall of mirrors, as the Portraits invite the subjects to gaze at their reflections. In ‘Medea’, through doubled visions and in a ‘Narcissus-esque’ pool in ‘Circe’. Through these mythical female bodies, Webster is able to voice contemporary concerns of female agency and space. However rather than simply transgressing gender norms through such excess, Webster presents us sites of unfulfilled female destinies; rejecting socially prescribed conventions of marriage and maternity.

The poem ‘Medea in Athens’ begins with a nonchalant voice that is tinged with Webster’s own wit and irony. The beloved hero of the Argonautica Jason is diminished to a nothing: “Dead is he? Yes…”. Married now to Aegeus, King of Athens, so far is Medea now from her past life in Colchis that she regards Jason as an echo. Medea in a lackadaisical fashion reveals the inner anxieties of her mind in acrimonious self-satisfaction. Medea speaks self-rhetorically: “If I spoke “Good news for us but ill news for the dead”, Medea openly discusses the options she considers as a socially acceptable response to death. Webster’s Medea is a woman who gives a felicitous response and great reflections, immediately showing a contrast to the impulsive and reckless Medea of myth. This is an intelligent woman who is consciously aware of clichés, such as “pat-phrase(s)” and the “trick of words”. In an attempt to construct her own narrative, Medea sets herself apart “from some one other’s song”, establishing her cognizance and identity, separate from an outmoded poetic tradition.

Webster furthers Medea’s physical and metaphysical isolation with the use of anaphora, “its useless talk and useless smiles and idiots’ prying eyes.” Days converge into a singular futile haze, until news of Jason’s death startles Medea despite her protests that the news “seemed neither good nor ill.” In an effort for her voice to remain neutral, Medea’s words have the opposite effect and translate to the reader as apathetic. Webster thus engages in an implicit critique of male privilege and rejects the forced engagement with the male subject. Through assonance and consonance Webster coalesces a harmonious, free-flowing structure with Medea’s unhinged, contemplative speech to create a poetic hybrid. As T.D Olverson writes, Victorian women writers selected these defiant women “to articulate the disparities in civil status between men and women in Victorian society and home by appropriating transgressive female characters from ancient Greek literature and myth”. However Olverson goes on further to say that “women writers were able to express their rage and desires with a vengeance”. Fiske states that this does not include Webster as she objected to ‘pro-propagandist poetry’. Nonetheless, Webster in translating Euripides’ Medea and inserting such tongue in cheek lines: “In which the better part of safety lies…That the woman should not differ from the man” she secures a play that belongs to women, implicitly inserting cultural critique. One could argue, this is just as effective as her defiant public writings. Thus Webster, as Fiske demonstrates, is not just publically, but in-verse that Webster is “self consciously enacting and parodying the role of a self taught housewife before a respected Greek scholar.” Webster was not concerned with secreting the classics within elitist realms of male dominance. For Webster poetry could indeed ‘make something happen’, it can and must function as a social catalyst whilst preserving artistic integrity.  Furthermore, in order for the female poet to be heard and respected, the Victorian woman poet would engage in a public game of both submissive but challenging wordplay to appease and align with the status quo, yet still tacitly challenging disparity of the sexes. As Webster communicates through Medea, an intellectual woman’s life is wasted upon pleasing “fools” as Medea is; in “taking off the mask” faced with herself, aligned with the “weary mummers”. Medea is surrounded by actors but remains hesitant and reticent, careful to never again lose social standing. Even then, looking far into her own psyche, Medea cannot seem to feign melancholy and so powerfully states “I care nothing.” As Angela Leighton discusses, Webster’s verse does not ‘care’ for ‘the morbid and artificial melancholy’ of the sickly sensitive’, exposing the ‘misty purposelessness’ of one’s morbid preoccupation with the self in Victorian poetry.

In spite of this, Webster never allows her mythical voices to overlook their capabilities. Medea’s capacity for hate is made manifest, her will granted albeit nefariously. Jason’s death symbolises a new beginning: “a wanned and broken image of a god…dim counterfeit of Jason”. The various shifts from this point in time, perspective and tone disturb the monologue into a fitful procession of visions, as Medea declares “Has a god come to me? Is it thou, my Hecate? How know I all?.” Webster allows Medea to question herself, to voice her thoughts whether prophetic or her own insights. Webster then inserts a speech by Jason into her observation that aptly coalesces Jason’s perspective without being reductive of Medea’s voice: “What god befooled my wits to dream my fancy for her yellow curls”. However, Jason’s then listing of Medea’s “presciences”, “man’s wisdom” and “rage of love” seem artificial and manufactured to appease Medea’s subconscious. As Ostriker suggests, ‘the articulation of female anger, like female body language, is culturally taboo.” Illustrating such social deviance in verse has certainly contributed to the destabilization of gender typicalities and domestic values. This can be seen through Medea’s bold resistance, “I am no babe to shiver at an unavailing shade.” Thus, Webster is aware of the canonical infantilization of women and has Medea defiantly reject the literary and supernatural return. 

Lines 64-72 of Medea’s vision have been categorised by Sutphin as an active and open expression of desire. However considering the first opening lines and her intermission of her own subconscious; “Medea! What is it thou…do I drivel like a slight disconsolate girl”, her reaffirment and convalescence prove that this is unlikely. Jason is presented not as the wronged party, but as a short-sighted and guilt-stricken philanderer. Jason’s situation is thus feminized while Medea inhabits the dominant role as an onlooker. Webster thus creates a wild space of delirium where the self addresses the self, but Medea is still consciously aware of her own mercurial nature. Webster balances the blame of the marital breakdown in equal part, with two psyches conflicted and searching for stability. 

So far it has been shown that Medea is a multifaceted woman who represents the antithesis of Victorian female passivity; she is not a one-dimensional portrait or easily understood as per her predecessors. There have been many representations of Medea, as identified by Sutphin and Fiske. However Webster’s Medea is still defying the social convention of feminine labels. For example in the myth’s oral tradition, Medea falls from the devoted loving guardian of Jason to a destructive ‘madwoman as spectacle’. Appealing to Hera, the goddess of conjugal fidelity and the personification of the wronged wife, it is before her temple where Medea lays her children in myth. Both women enact their wrath after experiencing a husband’s betrayal. It is Hera that punishes Heracles, bewitching him into murdering his entire family for the act of Zeus’ infidelity. Furthermore, it can be observed that women existing within literary adaptations of myth, such as Euripides’ tragic plays are catalytic, enacting both heroism and kindness but also deceit and deathly dexterity.  

In the Athenian public space, women were confined to public silence and within Greek tragedies there were explorations of the ‘dangers of female otherness’, presenting a resolution for ‘female subordination’. Webster being an expert in Greek writing would certainly have noticed this.Violence was the ultimate agent of change in classical antiquity, although for women this has remained staunchly gendered. Women with strong voices who delivered at times indigestible opinions and were proactive in the public sphere, were often demonised. As Medea cries “I live what thou hast made me.” Webster attempts to vindicate Medea in a certain radical reintegration of the outsider back into society. The poem stands as a exoneration of a murderous woman into nobility through displaying the pained recesses of her psyche. Nonetheless, Webster’s Medea cannot be written off as her other fragmented representations – a murderer, a witch or a forgotten ”wretch”. Removing these women from the ‘Epic’ stage to a space of human malaise, Webster utilises this familiar vulnerability, allowing for such passions to complicate the relationship between subject and object.

Comparatively, in ‘Circe’ Webster also adopts the use of the dramatic-I and magnifies the gaze, complicating the subject and object of the poem. Webster again repossesses a mythic voice, taking much from Ovid’s Circe and transforms her from Homer’s domesticated hostess. The poem begins with a sunset turned storm, allowing the female personification of darkness to “raise her arms” to snatch the sun and “draw him down”. This mirrors Circe’s capabilities as seductress who refuses to be ignored and ‘welcomes’ the storm, ‘welcoming’ change and “breaking the sickly sweet monotony”. Circe then pageants herself in a cascade of bucolic imagery using enjambment: “splitting the shrieking branches, tossing down my riotous vines with their young half-tinged grapes.” Webster’s frequent use of monosyllabic words and sibilance in these lines roll off the tongue and act as a celebration of desire. The sexual imagery is assertive and clear, albeit not as overt as Rossetti’s, which is arguably more successful. 

Unlike ‘Medea in Athens’ Circe welcomes all and does not wish to retreat into the private realm. Firmly in the public domain, Circe peers into the pool and finds her reflection, being the subject of her own gaze and the reader’s: “Perfect lovely face answering my gaze from out this fleckless pool.” Then, Circe anatomises her own body as a renaissance lover would: “wonder of glossy shoulders, chiselled limbs.” With the absence of the male lover, Circe resorts to loving herself. In a sense this poem can be read as a re-gendering of Narcissus. However the love of oneself is made into a healthy practice as opposed to leading to one’s doom. In waiting for the masculine lover to appear, gazing at the same environment with the anaphoric use of “always the same”, Circe is in effect wasting time that could have otherwise been productive. In the history of poetry it is usually the absence of the female lover that produces a poetics of love. It is a poetics that focuses on male constructions of female ‘perfection.’ such as Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591). The woman presence is brought to life in sonnets and epyllions, but her sexuality is idealised and at times erased to eroticise her innocence. Webster’s Circe instead de-mythologises herself and her sexuality: “Oh me I am a woman, not a god.” and declares that the nymphs embody the feminine as they are more free, sexual beings. Webster ironicises this through a reductive and passive imagery: “my nymphs who have the souls of flowers and birds.” Circe has yet to recognise her strength as an dynamic force of nature, within her is a “stronger power than basilisks, whose gaze can only kill”. While femininity is aligned with nature, maleness finds a more loathsome position, as Circe later denies the male gaze any legitimacy and chooses to empower herself.

 Through utilising the monologue, Webster illustrates how Circe first believes that she lives and breathes and exists solely for men: “Why am I so fair and marvellously minded?” and can only be validated by their love. Through Circe’s self reflection and examining of her situation “Does some one cry for me not knowing whom he calls?” and “Will there be never never such a man.” Here Webster warns against the social constructions of sexuality and gender both in verse and out of it. Such grand expectations of love previously shown in the canon can be harmful and at times deluded. Circe imagines that a man is lusting after her, to mirror her own sexual desires and attempts to fit herself into a narrow and gendered outline of what is ‘woman’. Playing on the reader’s expectations, cemented by the history of the love lyric, Webster creates a void in the poem of the ‘perfect lover’, Circe’s addressee. Thus Webster ironicises Circe’s inability to function without a male counterpart. Circe, previously the captor, is made captive of her own mind on a monotonous island, a domestic sphere. Webster therefore rewrites Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos Eaters’, a poem of male sensuality and instead gives female desire a voice.   

The further triangulation and sea of eyes forces the reader to unavoidably objectify Circe through the first person. Thus Webster highlights issues of suppressed, reductive and confined subjectivity. While Luu argues that by Webster giving her women ‘voice subjectivity and agency’ it maximises their grotesqueness, other critics focus on the ways this minimizes their monstrosity and marginality. One could argue that the poem ‘Circe’ fits into Luu’s category of sexualising bodies, however ‘Medea in Athens’ does not. Webster allows Medea to control the spectacle, placing the gaze firmly upon Jason as a ‘withered’ man, even as a ghost his voice is overwritten. Whereas in ‘Circe’, her sensuality draws parallels to the goblins of Rossetti’s Goblin Market, as desire, sexual or otherwise, is rewarded with severe repercussions. It is only through sisterly solidarity that Lizzie and Laura survive the predatory goblins’ cursed fruits. Likewise in ‘Circe’, her magic cup of transfiguration reduces men to low and base forms to reflect their concealed natures. In the case of Odysseus’ crew, they find themselves as pigs. Instead of her ideal lover, Circe is surrounded by “bestial things” who “munch” and “snarl and filch.” Circe cannot play the part of Mariana in “sickly sweet monotony.” The private sphere is not a haven of domestic privilege but a restriction of the right to experience sexual passion. Imprisoned, Circe asks “Must life be only sweet, all honey pap as babes would have their food?” Circe thus turns the mirror and reflects the 19th Century woman seeking her rights. Leighton writes “Homer’s cup of female enchantment becomes, in Webster’s hands, the cup of female truth”. In expressing the ineffable, Webster’s personae represent the unsounded voices of women, no matter how unsympathetic their situations. These powerful women are rejected, othered and silenced, which in itself is no myth. As Leighton writes, Webster is preoccupied with ‘real, live women; not with ‘genius.’ The reader of Webster’s poetry must lend an ear to the sounding of social prejudices. As Luu has suggested, acts of self-gazing enable Circe and Medea to reclaim their agency, power, voice and self. 

The poems thus remind the reader that it is possible to traverse through times of extraordinary hardship. Women are forces of both internal and external change. Of such change, all women are fruits and mouthpieces. They are agents of their own faculties, proficient in elevating themselves from ephemeral states and temporary conditions. Webster targets those stilted mirror images, challenging the social convention of resolutely requited marital love and subverting it. Both Medea and Circe were competent in changing their positions, rather than becoming objects of desire they snatched the reigns and chose to drive their own chariots. Their demonising by men foreshadows and symbolises the same plight that the ‘New Woman’ would soon witness. These powers in varying extremes inhabit every woman and that is her voice, in consequence contributing towards an assertion of female autonomous selfhood.  

Works cited: 

Bell, Mackenzie. “Augusta Webster.” The Poets and the Poetry of the Century.Vol. 7. London: Hutchinson & Co, . 499-506. (1892)

Brown, Susan. “Determined Heroines: George Eliot, Augusta Webster, and Closet Drama by Victorian Women.” Victorian Poetry 33.1 : 89-109.(1995)

Byron, Glennis. “Rethinking the Dramatic Monologue: Victorian Women Poets and Social Critique.” Victorian Women Poets Essays and Studies 56. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer,  79-98. (2003).

Fiske, Shayne. “Augusta Webster and the Social History of Myth” Women’s Studies 40.4: 469-490. (2011)

Hensley, Nathan K.  “After Death: Christina Rossetti’s Timescales of Catastrophe”, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 38:5, 399-415. (2016)

Leighton, Angela. “Victorian women poets : writing against the heart” Charlottesville ;London : University Press of Virginia, (1992)

Luu, Helen. “Freaks of Femininity: Webster’s Gallery of Female Grotesques in Portraits” Victorian Poetry, vol 55, no. 1 pp85-103 (2017)

Rigg, Patricia Diane. Julia Augusta Webster: “Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer”. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, (2009).

Stern, Edward S. “The Medea Complex: The Mother’s Homicidal Wishes to Her Child.” Journal of Mental Science, vol. 94, no. 395, pp. 321–331 (1948)

Sutphin, Christine. “The representation of women’s heterosexual desire in Augusta Webster’s “Circe” and “Medea in Athens”,” Women’ Writing, 5:3, 373-393 (1998)

 Tyminski, Robert. “The Medea Complex – Myth and Modern Manifestation”, Jung Journal, 8:1, 28-40, (2014)

Webster, Augusta. “The Medea of Euripides: Literally translated into English Verse” Cambridge University Press Macmillan and co. London. (1868)

Webster, Augusta. Augusta Webster: Portraits and other poems. Broadview Press, (2000).