Bacchic Transference and Ecstatic Faith: Michael Field's Callirrhoë and the Origins of Drama

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Notes

¹Margaret Sackville, A Hymn to Dionysus, and Other Poems (London: Elkin Mathews, 1905).

²The first published work on Nietzsche in English was Havelock Ellis's two-part essay in Savoy 2 (April 1896), 79–94, Savoy 3 (July 1896), 68–81.

³Michael Field, Callirrhoë: Fair Rosamund (London: George Bell, 1884), hereafter abbreviated as C.

⁴Wilde coined the phrase “self-conscious culture” in “The Decay of Lying” (see Intentions), but his major statement of the ideals of cosmopolitanism and critical subjectivity was “The Critic as Artist.” Oscar Wilde, Collected Edition: Intentions and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, ed. Robert Ross (London: Methuen, 1908).

⁵Hegel's evolutionary schemata is outlined in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Poetic drama emerges as the culmination of the history of cultural phases (the Symbolic, the Classical, and the Romantic), and the synthesis of the mediums of sculpture, painting, music, and lyric poetry. It is both embodied beauty, like sculpture, temporally dynamic, like music, and an ideal representation of inwardness, like lyric poetry.

⁶What we might call Hegelian Hellenism was given its fullest expression in Pater's essay on “Winckelmann,” particularly in the passages about the evolutionary system of the arts and the “Greek Spirit” (The Renaissance, 167–175). The importance of Hegelianism in Wilde's work is underlined in Smith and Helfand (ed.), Oscar Wilde's Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989).

⁷Walter Pater, “The Bacchanals of Euripides,” originally published in Macmillan's Magazine May 1889, reprinted in Greek Studies (London: Macmillan, 1910), originally published in 1895. References are to the library edition of 1910.

⁸Pater, Greek Studies, 56–57.

⁹The violent undercurrent of Dionysus is suggested in “The Study of Dionysus” and, as Gerald Monsman has argued, in the Imaginary Portraits; see Pater's Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater (Baltimore: John Hopkins P, 1967). The sacrificial thematic of the Imaginary Portraits was illuminated most acutely for me in an unpublished essay by Sara Lyons on “The Politics of Pater's Imaginary Portraits.” In Wilde's work, it is again an experimental narrative form that manifests the Dionysian thematic. In “The Portrait of Mr W.H.” (Complete Works, 302–350), the actor Willie Hughes becomes the object of a cultish sacrifice and effectively takes on the role of Dionysus: murdered on tour in Europe, his blood is transfused in the growth of the vine, subsequently becoming a sacred principle of regenerative culture. This extraordinary narrative situates the birth of the Enlightenment as a product of guilt subsequent to sacrificial violence. Crucially, however, it allows for the transference of the Dionysian impulse, via the Shakespearean actor, into Enlightenment modernity, purged of contagious violence.

¹⁰René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 51.

¹¹Pater, Greek Studies, 76.

¹²Yopie Prins, “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 147–170.

¹³T.D. Olversen, Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2010), 131.

¹⁴Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992), 2.

¹⁵Michael Field, “Works and Days,” British Library, Add. MS 46784, Folio 4.

¹⁶In this light it is worth noting a remark of Rene Girard's, that there is no better demonstration of “mimetic desire” in its purest form than the operations of the modern stock market. See an interview by Robert Harrison on the internet radio archive, “Entitled Opinions” (September 17, 2005), http://frenchitalian.stanford.edu/opinions/girard.html.

¹⁷Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), 354–360. Kathy Psomiades reads “The Lady of Shalott” in terms of the Lady's anxieties about publicity, and the associated “erotic fall” involved in the entrance into the marketplace. See Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 26.

¹⁸ The Poems of Tennyson, 400–418. “The Palace of Art” was written only a month after “The Lady of Shalott” and both poems explore the condition of aesthetic alienation and autonomy according to metaphors of aristocratic retreat.

¹⁹See Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Routledge, 1957)

²⁰See Yeats's “Among School Children”: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/How can we know the dancer from the dance?” W.B.Yeats: The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1983), 215–217.

²¹Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1980), 174.

²⁵ The Birth of Tragedy, And Other Writings, 82.

²²See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, And Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Spiers, Trans. Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), and Pater, “A Study of Dionysus.”

²³John Burt Forster Jr., Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981), 42–51.

²⁴Mathew Rampley, Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 45.

²⁶Browning's general assessment of the play singles out the faun scene as its finest moment: “it recalls, to its disadvantage in certain respects, the wonderful Bacchae of Euripides; and the deaths are dealt thickly about, in hardly an artistic fashion; but the scene between Machaon and the Faun would compensate for almost any amount of crudeness and incompleteness,” Letter from Robert Browning, May 28, 1884, in Works and Days: From the Journals of Michael Field, ed. T. and D.C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933) 2–3.

²⁷Compare for instance, Keats's Lamia (from Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems), which allegorizes the dissolution of Lamia's Bacchic aesthetic imaginary with the philosophic gaze of the old sage Apollonius. See John Keats, The Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H.W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1958), 199–214.

²⁸See Walter Pater, The Renaissance, 190, for the advocacy of a “quickened sense of life” and a “quickened consciousness.” It could be argued, conversely, that Pater's vision of an aesthetic life is inherently faun-like, since he promotes the “children of this world” as the bearers of “art and song.”

²⁹The most relevant example of this tradition in this instance is Bataille's work on sacrificial paganism and the economy of the gift. In The Accursed Share, Bataille makes a qualitative distinction between a general economy based on the gift, and an economy of exchange value that binds objects and bodies to use value. His subsequent attempt to formulate a sacrificial cult in the wake of Surrealism might be seen as a late form of Dionysian Aestheticism, and it is significant that the language he used to justify the sacrificial impulse tended to mimic the Kantian discourse of beauty; in sacrifice the object effectively becomes an end-in-itself, released from all purposive roles. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989).

³⁰For a very brief but pithy discussion of Nietzsche's concept of mimesis which also takes in Wilde's “The Decay of Lying,” see Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002), 366–368. Halliwell situates The Birth of Tragedy in the Aristotelian strand of thought in which art mimics the productive power of nature, while Wilde's work is read as a “parodic antimimeticism” (368) that strategically inverts Platonism.

³¹Oscar Wilde, Collected Edition: Intentions and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, ed. Robert Ross (London: Methuen, 1908), 1–56.

³²Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance” in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York, London: Penguin, 1982), 175–204.

³³Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (London: Merlin Press, 1963), 35. The proximity between Bradley and Cooper and Harrison's vision of the mimetic character of the Dionysian rites further supports Yopie Prins's argument for a feminine counter-tradition within Victorian Hellenism. Her remarks about Harrison's account of the dromenon are particularly relevant here (Prins, “Greek Maenads,” 67), since she stresses the importance of collective performance in Harrison's Themis.

³⁴René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Leominster: Gracewing, 2001), 78.