Women, as Virginia Woolf recognized, need rooms of their own to write. So, too, have women writers throughout history needed a term to describe what it is they do. In How Women Became Poets, Emily Hauser rewrites the story of ancient Greek literature as one of gender鈥攔edefining the canon as a constant struggle for women to be heard through, and sometimes despite, gender. She follows ancient Greek poets, philosophers, and historians as they developed and debated the vocabulary for authorship on the battleground of gender鈥攁nd reinserts women into the traditionally all-male canon of Greek literature, arguing for the centrality of their role in shaping ideas around what it means to be an author.
Why is it important to reclaim the voices of female poets?
EH: Sappho was one of the most important poets (not just female poets: poets) in antiquity: her literary status surpassed that of most men. Yet Sappho was by no means the norm for a woman in ancient Greece. Most women lacked the same kind of access to education that their male peers had; those women who did become poets struggled to make their voices heard; and the subsequent erasure of their work by the male-ringfenced tradition that handed down ancient literature, that curated 鈥渢he Classics鈥� and said what should and shouldn鈥檛 be read, marginalized women鈥檚 writing even more. By delving into the surviving fragments of women鈥檚 poetry from the ancient world, and looking at what women were saying, in their own words, about what it meant to them to be a poet, I鈥檓 attempting not only to give the female poets a voice again, but also to demonstrate that they were actually central participants in the ancient Greek conversation around what it meant to be 鈥渁 poet鈥�. Although men ended up being seen as the prototypical poets, because authorship (in the West, looking back to classically-inspired models) was for hundreds of years the province of men, the early years represented a fiercely contested battleground of gender. In other words: it didn鈥檛 have to be this way.
I know you鈥檙e a writer yourself: did your experience of writing as a woman speak to how you looked back to poets like Sappho?
EH: All my writing鈥攂oth my fiction and non-fiction鈥攆ocuses on reclaiming the voices of the women of the ancient world. So the positionality of my experience as a woman writer in the present is inevitably on my mind. I actually had the idea for the book during a seminar I was attending at Oxford on Sappho in 2014鈥攔ight around the time I was finishing my first novel, For the Most Beautiful, rewriting the women of Homer鈥檚 Iliad鈥攁nd I came away thinking: what would Sappho have called herself? I knew Homer had a word to talk about his identity as a bard鈥�aoidos, or 鈥渕ale singer鈥�. But did she have any words, any space, to acknowledge what she did? This reflection on Sappho鈥檚 context and her role in history intersected with my journey as a woman and a writer, and sparked my contemplation on issues of gender and identity, all the way back to antiquity.
So is this just a story about Sappho?
EH: Absolutely not: although Sappho was the starting point, I quickly realised, as I came to write the book, that it鈥檚 not possible to talk about women in ancient literature without thinking about the category of gender more broadly. This includes the kinds of dichotomies that get set up, particularly in male-authored poetry, the way men work hard to construct the 鈥榤asculinity鈥� of authorship and reinforce the binary opposition of gender (words are for men, not for women鈥攁 near-perfect quote of a brush-off that Telemachus gives to his mother Penelope near the opening of Homer鈥檚 Odyssey). One of the biggest revelations of the book, for me, was that this is a much bigger story about how we tell the story of gender in words: we can鈥檛 extract gendered identities from the way we speak, perform and write, and the way that traditional scholarship talks about 鈥渢he poet鈥� elides the fraught and high-stakes battle that continually unfolded to shape the gendering of literature. So we witness men constructing the edifice of the 鈥渕ale poet鈥� and working to make it appear inevitable; playwrights playing around with the gender binary and modelling what a nonbinary poet might look like; as well as women attempting to make their voices heard by using a new language to express their identity.
Can you explain the image of the bird on the book鈥檚 cover?
EH: It comes from a gorgeous wall painting from an ancient Bronze Age town at Akrotiri, Santorini. The buildings were buried under the eruption of Santorini鈥檚 volcano around 1600 BCE. The painting鈥攊ncredibly well-preserved under the thick layer of volcanic ash鈥攕hows a lush scene of a mountain landscape in spring: blue and red crags sprouting lilies, with swallows spiralling above. The bird motif recurs throughout the book, as a representation of how men try to pigeonhole women鈥檚 writing and silence their voices (I鈥檓 thinking particularly of the legend of Philomela, who was raped by her sister鈥檚 husband, had her tongue cut out to stop her speaking, and was turned by the gods into a swallow or, in some accounts, a nightingale). But it’s also an emblem of how women reclaim that image and turn it into a new word to describe their own song: the nightingale is a well-known songbird, and the Greek word for nightingale, 补脓诲艒苍, is a feminine noun that translates literally as 鈥渇emale singer鈥濃�攁 clever analogy for a woman poet. The book鈥檚 cover, with the bird flying free out of the words that describe her, captures this beautifully.
What do we find when we read 鈥榳omen鈥� into histories that often exclude them?
EH: We get a better, more accurate, more informed picture of history. If we keep telling a male-oriented history of Greek literature, we鈥檒l be fostering a story about the ancient world that fails to represent the voices of all the women who sought to be heard. The legacies of that past, and those strategies of gender marginalization, are still palpable today. Writing more inclusive histories of ancient literature (and that means all kinds of inclusivity, whether that鈥檚 along the lines of race, gender, class, or sexuality) means we can interrogate the past and foreground the voices that weren鈥檛 heard, in the hopes that they can be now.
Emily Hauser is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, and the author of the acclaimed Golden Apple trilogy retelling the stories of the women of Greek myth, including For the Most Beautiful (2016).