KAREN ALKALAY-GUTwhile she was a student at Cambridge. In "Xantippe" (1881), she uses the
dramatic monologue to explore what it meant for a woman intellectual to
"ache and ache" for "bread," only to receive a "stone." The poem gives
voice to Socrates's spouse: a figure reviled throughout history as the bane of
the ancient philosopher's life. Drawing on Aristotle's Ethics, which calls on
friendship as the means for mutual development, Xantippe recalls how she
entered into marriage with the expectation that she would acquire philoso-
phical wisdom, only to discover that Socrates was not in any respect a wise
husband. Neither was he interested in making her a wise wife. Once "we
were wedded" (AL 95), she declares, she learned "In sooth, a-many lessons;
bitter ones" (96) that taught her "sorrow," not the kind of "love inspired"
(97) that would reveal "Nature's divineness and her harmony" (103). Later
in the poem, she realizes that Socrates would have been able to improve
their marriage had he lived the philosophy that he preached:
'Twas only that the high philosopher,
Pregnant with noble theories and great thoughts,
Deigned not to stoop to touch so slight a thing
As the fine fabric of a woman's brain -
So subtle as a passionate woman's soul.
I think, if he had stooped a little, and cared,
I might have risen nearer to his height,
And not lain shattered (116-23)This eloquent passage recalls a memorable moment in Browning's "My
Last Duchess" (1842) where the ruthless Duke of Ferrara kills his wife
rather than tell her what it is about her manner that "disgusts" him (RB
38)."I choose / Never to stoop" (42-43), the Duke remarks bluntly. This
echo of Browning's poem indicates the larger project of "Xantippe" in
revising poetic tradition. Although Dante Gabriel Rossetti built on Brow-
ning's dramatic monologues in an attempt to comprehend a woman's mind
from a male viewpoint, Levy went a step further by employing a female
persona to represent the misunderstood "passionate woman's soul" in
history. But this is not her only achievement in contesting her poetic
heritage. The title of her first full-length collection, A Minor Poet and
Other Verse (1884), openly embraces the identity of the marginalized
writer: one who, as Cynthia Scheinberg and Joseph Bristow point out, 19
opposes the anti-feminist, gentile, and heterosexual values central to the
"major" canon favored by moralists such as Arnold.
Levy's lesbian contemporary Michael Field took an antithetical approach
toward challenging some of the assumptions of the "major" poetic tradi-
tion, especially the conventions that male poets used to represent women's
sexuality. Undefeated by the trials and tribulations that drove Levy to take
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