Medea at the Fin de Siècle : Revisionist Uses of Classical Myth in Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus

Abstract

Myth is that is not over/' Catherine Cl?ment asserts in The Newly Born Woman, adding that if begin to want their turn at telling this history, if they take the relay from men by putting myths into words ... it will ... be a read differendy (6). The uses that the fn-de-si?clew?tet Mona Caird made of this history read differendy in her artist-novel The Daughter? of Danaus (1894) is the subject of this essay. Many of Caird's writings invoke mythology Christian and Classical as a means of historicizing the social and sexual condition of late Victorian women in relation to earlier patriarchal structures, thereby bringing to light the legacy of their legal, theological, or cultural meta narratives in shaping and constraining contemporary women's lives. Thus in her Preface to The Wing of A^rael (1889) Caird refers to the biblical Azrael as the Angel of Death, of Fate, of Destruction who separates the soul from the body (1: xiii); as her novel about the demise of individual female talent implies, fragmentation and alienation was the prize women had to pay in marriage and the family. In The Pathway of the Gods (1898) Christian martyrdom and grisly visions of the Roman Coliseum serve to problematize the construction and self-representation of the New Woman as victim: the modern woman, Caird suggests, submits to being defined by and contained within mythical paradigms at her peril. One that Wins (1887) interrogates the biblical myth of Lilith ? the other woman, the rebel who defies man-made law ? in the figure of a woman painter, inverting the Madonna-Whore trope by ending the text on