Reading Poetry, Writing Genre, and is the author of a critically acclaimed trilogy of novels that reimagines the women of Greek myth: For the Most Beautiful, For the Winner, and For the Immortal.
Hauser applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature, and reported the following:
How Women Became Poets starts from a single, and unnerving, observation: the first and most famous female poet of ancient Greece, Sappho, had no word to describe who she was. Centuries of male-gendering of the idea of the poet in practice, and the grammatical structure of Greek—which genders nouns masculine, feminine or neuter—meant that the only word available to her, when she sang her songs, was a male one: “male bard”, “male singer”, “singer-man” (the Greek is aoidos). The book traces the journey of Greek literature as it was forged in the crucible of gender: the beginnings, with male-only poets; the processes of shoring up the vocabulary of poets as male; and women writers’ challenging those words to come up with a language to describe themselves and what they did, that was all their own.Visit Emily Hauser's website.
Page 99 is a deep dive into one of the case studies of a point in Greek literature where the masculine vocabulary of the poet is being challenged – not by a woman poet, but by a man, the classical Athenian comedian Aristophanes. Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria – a comedy that was performed in Athens in 411 BCE – is a rib-crackingly funny go at contemporary Greek poets, that imagines the celebrity tragedian Euripides learning lessons on how to be a good poet from a cross-dressing, gender-fluid poet called Agathon. At this point, we’re honing in on the central problem presented by the poet-terms that Aristophanes is poking fun at: a man who is called a poiētēs, a “poet-man” or “maker-man”, will never be able to write properly about women. It’s in the name, Agathon says. (The point is to explain why Euripides is such a misogynist in his plays – Aristophanes’ comic take on the famous poet’s infamous representations of women like Medea.) Here’s a quote from the middle of the page:Being able to compose poetry, as Agathon has shown in his treatise on gender imitation and the anēr poiētēs, means being able to “do” both men and women. To be a poiētēs, you have to be able to “‘do’ plays about women” (gunaikei’ ēn poiēi tis dramata, 151), and “‘do’ plays about men” (andreia d’ ēn poiēi tis, 154). “We have to compose (poiein) the same way we are,” Agathon finishes at the end of his poetic exposition (167)—just a few lines before Euripides pronounces that he used to be the same as Agathon when he started to write poetry (poiein, 174). Euripides’s description of his past activities of poiein (and its connection to gender-bending by In-law), without a poet-term, right on the heels of Agathon’s delineation of the gender-mimetic activities of the poiētēs, suggests that it is precisely the loss of his gender-mimetic poetic identity (similar to Agathon) that has led to the current problem of his misogynistic representations of women—and thus to the present charge against him by the women at the Thesmophoria. Agathon might, then, look like a double for Euripides at first glance; but he is, in fact, the opposite. He serves to demonstrate just where Euripides fails, in his inability to be gender flexible—both in his poetic representation of women, and in the vocabulary which names him as a poet.The text goes on to show that there might be some hope for Euripides, though: his final appearance in the play is cross-dressed as a woman carrying a harp (which I suggest might be a sly reference to Sappho herself). Perhaps he has learnt to acknowledge women’s experiences, and women’s voices and poetic identities, after all.
So how does the Page 99 Test work for my book? Across the 289-odd pages of text, there’s a story being told across the sweep of Greek literature, that traces a huge range of different gender-representations in texts from Homer (the epic poet who begins the Greek tradition) to Aristophanes and Plato (the famously anti-poetry philosopher) to Sappho, Nossis, and Anyte (Greek women poets whose voices and new kinds of language I’m foregrounding). Although page 99 of the book represents one kind of deep philological discussion of the way words are used to construct gendered poetic identities in ancient Greek, it doesn’t capture the breadth of the story, or the polyphony of voices – particularly women’s voices – that comes when you put all these texts together and watch how they interact with each other, speak to (and sometimes against) one another. And of course, for me, the biggest problem with the test is that it lands on a piece of poetry written by, and about, a man. If you want to get the whole story – if you want to take the journey to where women’s voices enter the scene – you need to read the whole book.
--Marshal Zeringue
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