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The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 CAROLINE WINTERER Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007 xiv, 242 pp.
Before the expansion of higher education at the turn of the twentieth century, the formal study of Greek and Latin was largely men's province. However, American women had drawn upon classicism by other means for more than a century before then. Following on her award-winning The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), Caroline Winterer analyzes the ways in which four generations of educated American women reshaped and employed classical tropes for their own political, social, and cultural purposes. Through its malleability and range of allusions, classicism helped women of the new nation navigate the apparent dichotomy between austere republicanism and consumer culture; later, it offered antislavery and proslavery writers alike a world of stories to support their antebellum causes.
Before 1770 the Greco-Roman past signified not American revolution but transatlantic and especially British taste. Elite women such as South Carolina's Eliza Lucas Pinckney gained increased access to classical culture, but within the constraints that stigmatized both "feminine frivolity and petticoat pedantry" (15). They drew their ideas of the classical world especially from Charles Rollins Ancient History, Alexander Pope's translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and Fénelon's The Adventures of Telemachus, the American careers of which Winterer traces in women's diaries, letters, and commonplace books. Written in or translated into eighteenth-century English, all four works could be seen as compatible with the progress of Christianity over the centuries. All four also helped fuel a rising world of goods, book-related artifacts, and home furnishings. Upper-class women in colonial North America incorporated and adapted classicism, too, when they sat for portraits in "turquerie," lounging fashionably on damask sofas and bedecked with turbans and jewels. This mixture of classicism and Orientalism, a recurring theme in Winterer's narrative, betrayed "an acute temporal flabbiness" (22) as eighteenth-century Americans blurred the distinctions between ancient Greece and its more recent, Turkish-controlled successor.
The American Revolution politicized women's classicism. On the one hand, classical tropes helped elite women champion the cause of...