There’s No Place Like Homeland: Victimized Greek Women, the Greek War of Independence , and the Limits of European Philhellenism

Abstract

Focussing on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Hellas, Catherine Grace Godwin’s Reine Canziani, and Felicia Hemans’s “The Bride of the Greek Isle,” this chapter rethinks nineteenth-century philhellenism by examining Romantic-era publications that scrutinized the efficacy of, and ideologies pushing forward, British support for Greek independence. The chapter argues that all three writers employ the trope of the “captive woman” not to conform to orientalist readings of the East but instead to force readers to reflect upon the Western world’s own treatment of Greek women. All three writers challenge both those Britons opposed to or apathetic toward Greek independence and national sovereignty and those who advocate a philhellenism detrimental to the Greeks because it ignores the realities of every day Modern Greek life.