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Amy Levy's "Xantippe," frequently mentioned in New Woman and fin de siècle scholarship as well as recent studies of women writers' engagement with classicism, represents the wife of Socrates on her deathbed as she looks back on her girlhood quest for knowledge, denial of access to learned discourse with Socrates or his inteUectual circle, and gradual subsidence into the embittered role of subordinate wife.1 In contrast to the feminist message of this, Levy's best-known poem, her choice of subject has occasioned surprisingly little comment, as if an eighteen-year-old poet's decision to write an extended dramatic monologue uttered by the wife of Socrates - so famous for Ul temper that the OED lists her name as a synonym for "shrew" - were a matter of course. Levy turned to classical subject matter, in fact, only in three poems: "Xantippe," "Medea," and "A Greek Girl," all published in her 1884 coUection, A Minor Poet and Other Verse.2 Why did she turn to classicism at all when it was not to be an abiding focus in her work?
Asking why Levy might have assumed the poetic persona of Xantippe opens new perspectives on her self-positioning and her poem's significance. Rather than pursuing an influence study, a general semiotics of intertextuality, or Levy's critique of classical tradition through a feminist parody of one of its famous narratives, I suggest that Levy deliberately inserted her poem into a complex discursive network of British and German classical scholarship, higher criticism, and popular print culture. Examining the poem from within this nexus of discourses indicates that, rather than a transparent feminist polemic, "Xantippe" is a multilayered and highly inflected poetic text. Levy's adoption of classical subject matter and Xantippe's persona in fact aUowed her to write simultaneously as an authorized participant in classical studies, a Jew, and a woman writer. I begin with the poem's relation to classical scholarship and its significance as a performative enactment of educated discourse.
"XANTIPPE" AND CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP
The date of Levy's composition of "Xantippe" is telling. Her biographer Linda Hunt Beckman places it around or just after the publication in July 1879 of "Run to Death," the narrative poem in which nobility in prerevolutionary France hunt a gypsy woman and her child for sport. Levy composed...