BMCR 2009.06.56: Lefkowitz on Klinck, Woman's Songs in Ancient Greece

Anne L. Klinck, Woman's Songs in Ancient Greece.  Montreal/Kingston:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008.  Pp. xxii, 290.  ISBN
9780773534483.  $85.00.  ISBN 9780773534490.  $32.95 (pb).

Reviewed by Mary R. Lefkowitz, Wellesley College
([email protected])
Word count:  808 words
-------------------------------
To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2009/2009-06-56.html
To comment on this review, see
http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/06/20090656.html
-------------------------------

Table of Contents (http://mqup.mcgill.ca/extra.php?id=853)

Klinck, professor emerita at the University of New Brunswick, is the
author of a book on old English elegy and editor of An Anthology of
Ancient and Medieval Women's Song, with texts and translations of
selections from Alcman, Sappho, Aristophanes, Euripides, and
Theocritus, prefaced by brief introductions.[[1]] The present anthology
is a "collection and study based on voice and performance rather than
authorship." The poems and passages selected are "expressions of a
sense of female community. They represent a constructed rather than an
essential femininity--constructed differently by male and female
authors" (ix-x). The inclusion of passages from poems by male writers
allows readers to hear female voices in the kinds of extreme situations
that no surviving ancient Greek woman writer chose to describe.

Unlike Klinck's earlier volume, this anthology seems to be primarily
intended for readers who know at least some Greek and who wish to have
some contact with the original texts. For the convenience of those
readers, Greek texts of the selections discussed have facing English
translations, plus explanatory notes in which Greek words are cited in
transliteration. A general introduction and introductory sections
before each chapter provide surveys of relevant issues and scholarship
which assume that readers already have some background in Greek
literature, if only in translation. Such readers (including advanced
undergraduates) will find in this book a well-informed and useful guide
to the many complex issues involved in understanding the nature and
function of women's songs. Experienced scholars also will find Klinck's
discussion of the texts stimulating and informative.

The general introduction begins with a judicious discussion of various
theories of performance put forth in the last fifty years. Klinck
argues that oral transmission might have made it possible for audiences
to fail to make a distinction between author and performer, and perhaps
even to forget about the author altogether. But can we know what any
audiences thought, given the almost total lack of any contemporary
information about reception? Klinck rightly warns against taking
traditional and modern designations of genres too seriously, or drawing
too sharp a distinction between public and private. Klinck uses the
term gynaikeia mele to describe poetry either by anonymous or female or
male authors with women-voiced speakers who warn about the dangers of
passion and other forms of excess, and briefly notes how the tradition
continued in Western Europe; readers who wish to know more will need to
refer to her earlier anthology.[[2]] Klinck sees ancient Greek
maiden-song as a genre that was particularly acceptable in a
male-dominated culture, because of the modesty and piety voiced by the
girl speakers.[[3]] She surveys the role of the "innocent, unheroic"
female choruses in Greek drama, and briefly describes the learned and
self-conscious depictions of women's life in the poetry of the
Hellenistic period. In conclusion, Klinck makes a general distinction
between the spontaneous and communal character of women's writing (and
songs written by men for maidens) and the more dangerous femininity
portrayed in works by men.

The anthology is weighted toward songs written by women and by men for
women's choruses. Texts are presented in chronological order: most of
Alcman, followed by most of Sappho and of Corinna, then Pindar's
partheneia, and fragments of other lyric poetry, including Simonides on
Danae. Klinck then offers lyric passages from drama: Electra's opening
monologue and exchanges with the chorus and Orestes from Sophocles'
drama (though not the urn speech), then from Euripides the first and
second stasima of the Hippolytus and the third and terrifying fourth
stasima of the Bacchae. These selections, with their emphasis on piety
and morality, provide good illustrations of what Klinck would call
"constructed" notions of female character and, in case of the chorus of
Asian Bacchants, of considerable emotional excess. Klinck's
translations are occasionally too anodyne. For example, "what is lovely
is always dear," seems far too polite for the refrain ho ti kalon
philon aei (Eur., Ba. 881, 901), because in this passage the chorus is
singing about the gratification that comes from defeating one's enemy.
The final chapter presents some of Nossis' epigrams, Theocritus'
Epithalamion for Helen, and Bion's Lament for Adonis, selections that
describe the communal behavior of women.

It is all too easy to second-guess the compilers of anthologies, but
Erinna's Distaff (Supp.Hell. 401) would logically have belonged in this
collection, even though it is composed in dactylic hexameter, like the
passages that Klinck includes from Theocritus and Bion. As long as
Klinck was including non-lyric verses, she might also have added some
passages from tragedy in which women speak in iambic trimeter about
womanly virtues: e.g., Andromache's speech about being a good wife
(Eur., Tro. 643-58) or Jocasta's speech recommending equality in
government (Phoen. 531-48), or Praxithea's patriotic speech from
Euripides' Erechtheus (TrGF 5.1, 360).[[4]] In ancient Greek poetry at
least, women could act as wise advisors to men.


------------------
Notes:


1.   Anne L. Klinck, ed., An Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman's
Song (Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

2.   See Klinck 2004 (n.1) 1-15.

3.   One wonders if the content was similar in the informal girls'
wedding songs alluded to in Pindar, Pyth. 3. 16-19, or the relayed
"Sapphic conversations" (Posidippus IX 2) and "the Sapphic songs,
divine melodies" accompanying the dirges sung for a dead girl
(Posidippus VIII.24), where Sapphoia presumably means "in the style of
Sappho," songs by women for women.

4.   For other possibilities, see e.g., "Men's Words in Women's Mouths"
in Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant,  eds., Women's Life in Greece
and Rome, Ed. 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005),
10-15, 367-69 (not included in Klinck's bibliography).