Ode on a Grecian Girl
Keats’ beautiful poem is part of a pageant of stories exploring what’s euphemistically called the “forceful claim,” where a young woman’s life is stolen before it even really begins
“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness” is how John Keats addresses a beautiful artifact from ancient Greece which he probably saw in the British Museum. In his famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the poet tells us about a piece of pottery decorated by a “flowery tale” where a “Bold Lover” approaches a “fair” maiden in a “leaf-fringed” setting, preparing to carry her off from this peaceful, happy world. Like the vase, the girl is “unravish’d,” at least for the moment. But this is a special piece of pottery, and the narrative which the poet traces in the string of figures stretched across the urn’s surface works differently.
Classical scholar Susan Langdon explains in Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece, 1100–700 B.C.E. (2008) that such a chain of images typically includes a group of young women holding hands or branches, coming together in a dance that’s interrupted by a warrior who ventures upon them. Occupying a horizontal band or frieze, these characters lay out the elements of a marriage by capture, a ritual where a young female’s initiation into adulthood takes place through her obliteration.
We know the women assembled here are young because their hair is flowing and loose, and the simple marks on their clothing advertise ripeness and fertility. They seem almost identical, yet one of them will be removed from her friends and age-mates by a man who exerts his “forceful claim,” grabbing her by the wrist to steal her away. Sometimes, this scenery includes a weapon or a ship stationed nearby. One ritual is crashed by another as the hero inserts and asserts himself, splitting open the dance in order to secure his lineage. No other man watches, stops, or fights him, and the story is over before it really begins.
Langdon argues that such ancient artwork protected hierarchy, recorded and justified the gender divide, and possibly accompanied ceremonies held to celebrate these disruptions. Other items with similar decorations have been included in “maiden kits” found inside the graves of young women, bestowing on them in death the glorious wifely status they’d missed by dying. Art provides the glue for repairing a shattered world, transforming rude violence into a necessary part of culture and sometimes helping us overlook a young girl’s violation.
For the young woman, however, there’s no contest, no illusion of choice, and no chance of escape. Her participation in the dance illustrates the orderliness of her society but also makes her vulnerable: the dance becomes a trap, removing her from the life she knows. The day is ruined and the music stops. How many Broadway musicals play with similar plot elements, where the world a young woman happily, competently, and safely inhabits comes to an abrupt stop? Maybe “A Star is Born” when “A Chorus Line” is raided. The details are pretty basic: whatever enables some young woman to capture attention also forces her away from us, like a cancelled comet. Only a “forceful claim” could divert something so powerful.
But Keats’ poem freezes the frieze, stopping the expected action in time and space, telling us instead about a man who cannot complete this task: “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,/Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;/She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” The hero comes close, but there’s no cigar — the prize remains distant with the victory unwon and the young woman unmarried. But for Keats this situation is preferable: “More happy love! more happy, happy love!/ For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,/For ever panting, and for ever young.” Without the rape, Keats says life will continue; indeed, foregoing capture means no one will age or die.
Yet the story of capture, kidnapping, and rape remains a popular one, carved or painted on countless examples of pottery as well as recorded in multiple heroic poems and songs and deeply incised in our imaginations. The same plot explains Persephone’s disappearance when she’s “plucked” by Hades and brought to the underworld: marriage here is explicitly linked with disappearance, captivity, and punishment, while intimacy is strangely paired with the destruction of personal experience. A young woman’s awakening to her powers of movement, capacity for thought, and chances for independence collapses with the evaporation of her freedom.
Although there’s considerable evidence of the initiation rites Greek boys underwent, Langdon says ancient pottery and jewelry offer little help in documenting whether Greek girls completed similar rituals. Anthropologist Bruce Lincoln explores how other societies groom young women in Emerging from the Chrysalis (1991), often describing spectacular ceremonies in which young girls prepare to face their fates with skill, confidence, and public support (see illustration below). A warrior’s “forceful claim” would not only obviate or obliterate the training processes Lincoln examines, but also explode the chrysalis, ignoring whatever a young girl thinks about her fitness to inhabit a traditional role.
Keats uses art to block the kidnapping and rescue the young woman from captivity; and what the poet calls a “Cold pastoral” — where the inanimate lover and beloved are forever divided — also ironically, generously, delicately, keeps the young woman’s life in play. The fragility of the urn is turned into a sturdy support for the still-more-fragile chance that a maiden momentarily comes into view, unharmed by what surrounds her. Keats refuses to link beauty with pain. Overturning the rules organizing the pageantry on a piece of pottery, a narrative which begins with a homely procession or festive dance will not end with a rape.
The fleeting moment Keats interrupts and immortalizes is investigated and expanded in a handful of later narratives about young women beginning to feel their powers and enjoy them, away from home for the first time and at some remove from their elders, often left together to their own devices. “Sex and the City” gives the maidens a few more years, for instance, as well as spending money and access to contraception. Other examples give the threats and rewards of maturity and sisterhood equally sustained attention — playing, the way Keats does, with ideas about marriage, abduction, and whatever enables a young female to stick around rather than disappear.
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Each of these stories slows down the maturing process and represents young women as growing up alongside each other, experiencing new powers of thought, feeling, and desire in terms of things they might talk over, care about, and regulate together.
“Sex and the City,” for instance, convenes a collection of nearly interchangeable female figures in the urban frieze-frame of New York City. All of these women are accomplished, sexually available and far from home, and we can easily spot Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha in a series of brunch spots, wine bars, and art galleries in NYC, awaiting rather than dreading their “capture” while encouraging each other in other pursuits in the meantime.
The band of young women at the center of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966) is still in the process of growing up when we meet them, and the maturation process is often interrupted by these women themselves, rather than derailed or invaded by outside forces. Indeed, women in Susann’s novel often view each other as competitors rather than as comrades. Even the friendship between Anne, Neely, and Jennifer — more enduring and rewarding than any of the connections these three women form with men — teaches them primarily to trash themselves and each other. They trade clothes, advice, and pills as a way to keep themselves young, marriageable, and marketable; not only almost-eternally ripe for “plucking,” these three women are also rather eager to be led away.
Still, putting the two stories together helps us see the careful moves involved in creating a circle of young (youngish) women holding hands in some glorious setting. We might wonder how long they would dance (or gossip, or dine, or drink) if they remained undisturbed. Without the ruined dance and sudden abduction, other chances come into view, too. Would there be enough lovers for all of these women? And are there other goods which these female figures can hope for or work towards, together or on their own — other ways, that is, of advancing their own “forceful” claims?
New York Times film critic Bowsley Crowther archly linked the movie version of “Valley of the Dolls” with Little Women in his scathing 1967 review, but the connections between these two stories are instructive, and Alcott’s novel provides a third model of how women might grow up and stay safe together.
Indeed, Alcott and Susann’s stories have much in common, arming the young women for battle in each novel while not entirely repelling “invasion.” Each story, for instance, imagines how a hero might be foiled when the women take steps to make themselves interchangeable or unrecognizable. Of course, that Neely and Anne share the same black coat might simply be a cost-cutting move rather than self-protective strategy; Jo March’s evasions and calculations are more obvious. The long flowing hair of the maidens on Greek vases is turned into ready cash when Jo — who regularly calls herself a boy! — cuts off her lustrous brown hair so that she can send money to her father, and what might entice a powerful warrior is used instead to help heal a weakened patriarch.
In both Alcott’s and Susann’s novels, all of the young women know how to dance, but some of them can sing and act, too, and even write out new scripts. Once again, though, Jo is the clearest rebel. With her soiled gloves and burned dress, she seems to take special pains in handicapping her sisters’ chances for marriage, voicing clear unhappiness when Meg is “plucked” by John Brooke.
But the other March sisters navigate the maturing process in other ways, as well. We might consider Amy March too young for the initation rites her older sisters undergo, for instance, but her time with Aunt March prepares her for marriage with Laurie someday; she’s the first girl who leaves home, after all, and her unwanted stay away readies her for a happy life elsewhere in the future.
Written a hundred years later, Susann’s novel can’t imagine similarly happy fates for the young women it only briefly rescues. Finally grown up, Susann’s adult females have little to live for: Anne’s husband cheats on her; Neely’s career plateaus; and the beautiful Jennifer kills herself rather than have a mastectomy.
Even before that awful end, Jennifer appears to turn the capture narrative upside down when she coaxes a developmentally delayed young man into marriage. But I’d propose that Alcott’s Beth represents the most dramatic inversion of the Greek story of kidnapping, rape, and disappearance. Beth remains more childlike for longer, for one thing: lavishing time on caring for “invalid” dolls, those (unnecessary?) duties tuck her inside the March household, making her less visible for inspection or capture. Sickness also limits Beth’s movements, and death stalks her the way an armed lover would, hoping to snag her when her mother is tending Mr. March in Washington, DC.
But Beth also has the gentle, wealthy older Mr. Laurence looking out for her. We are told that he recollects in Beth the granddaughter he’s lost — perhaps this other girl was a victim of something like the initation rites decribed here, where maturity coincides with one kind of burial or another. Mr. Laurence’s marked liking for Beth results in the special gift of a piano, and perhaps this present, combined with his unwavering affection, are what graciously spare Beth from Death rather than make her violently yield to it.
Too old to be a suitable mate, Mr. Laurence is a sexless benefactor. In the 1994 movie, his piano arrives after Beth recovers from scarlet fever, but in Alcott’s novel, the gift is sent first, perhaps as a way to ward off attack, the grandfather’s tenderness enclosing Beth before she falls ill. In either case, we see another powerful man facing off with the violent warrior, making his own “forceful claim” that Beth be left alone.
Beth only dodges her fate for a short while, and maybe this is because Mr. Laurence picks her out of the line of March girls and gives her something precious — her own instrument for music, song, and ode-making — which then allows her to resume her spot inside the maidens’ circle.
Still, for a limited time, the March household of young women remains undisturbed, except for the new music Beth is producing. There’s no rape or kidnapping, and the pleasant-enough prospect of Meg’s marriage has been delayed; even the memory of a dead granddaughter is silently pushed to the side.
Alcott represents The Valley of the Dolls in the Shadow of Death. But during this brief interval, the “still unravish’d bride” Beth comes into her own as a creator and musician. We can imagine that her playing covers the scream of the Grecian girl who’d been dancing with her friends before a stranger arrives and rudely takes her away. For a short time only, Beth will remain safe like the maiden on Keats’ Grecian Urn, and in the company of other little women.
