In the previous posting, I
got to a point I’d been aiming for for a while. I wrote about the curious place
Hercules reaches – the place when he encounters two women, each of whom offers
him a particular way of life.
If he picks the way offered
by one woman, Pleasure, he will get precisely what her name indicates – a life
of food, drink and other pleasures without needing to toil for them. Should he
choose the other way, offered by Hard Work or Virtue, toil is just what he will
need to do. His life will be one continue toil, but with the reward at the end
of enduring fame.
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| Detail of Choice of Hercules panel, Adam Room,Grove House, Roehampton. Adaptation of photo by Marina Vorobieva for Our Mythical Childhood |
The episode looks to be very
much about Hercules. The women are each seeking to persuade him to choose their
particular set of gifts. What Hercules chooses will determine the course of his
future life. It is perhaps the most pivotal moment in the mythical career of
the hero.
But what I said in the
previous posting is that Hercules is not actually necessary to the scene. In
this current posting, I shall explain what I mean by this. I’ll do this by setting
out three different things I’ve experienced in relation to the episode. Or, at
least: two of the things I’ll share are specific responses to the scene. The
third is likely to be a response to the many artistic representations that were
popular in art from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century.
The women approach Hercules
The first of the responses took
place several years ago, in spring 2016, a few months before the ERC-funded
project for which I’m creating the activities based on the chimneypiece panel
began.
The academic year 2015-16
saw the University of Roehampton celebrating 175 years of providing Higher
Education, particularly Higher Education for women – as Whitelands, now one of the colleges of the University,
was founded in 1841. To mark this
anniversary, the “Class of 2020,” 175 young women aged 14-15, were chosen from
schools in the local area to come to campus on a series of Saturdays during the
academic year, each time to take part in activities organised by one of the
academic departments.
When it was the turn of my
department, Humanities, colleagues and myself, led by Dr Marta García Morcillo,
put together a set of activities based on the history of the campus, including
its classically-inspired features. Included among these neoclassical elements
was the chimneypiece in the Adam Room. I was based in in the room, to discuss
the chimneypiece, particularly the panel, with the girls.
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| The Adam Room, Grove House, Roehampton with chimneypiece panel bottom, middle. Photo by Marina Vorobieva |
As a classicist interested in Hercules, my eye had always been drawn to the
man in the middle, to Hercules. I saw the scene as something concerned with the
hero and the Choice he is asked to make between two opposite paths in life. I’d
considered the panel to be showing Hercules caught in the process of trying to
decide: his face turned towards Virtue and his body towards Pleasure.
But it was not the man in the middle that the young women were
interested in. What interested them were the two women and how each of them was making a play for the man – by their
gestures, and the gifts they offer.
Thus, for the girls, it was possible to respond to the scene without
focusing on Hercules, but on the two other figures on the panel.
Hercules is
removed
The second thing happened at a workshop in Warsaw
during one of the conferences linked with the Our Mythical Childhood project.
This was a stage of the project before the creation by Steve Simons of his
high-quality drawings of the panel. As a temporary measure, I had made what came
as close as I could manage to a line drawing via the photo editing facility on
my computer. The resulting image was far from ideal, but enough to give some
sense of what scene entailed and what the activities involved.
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| Choice of Hercules workshop creations, Life is Cool cafe, Warsaw 2018 including Hercules cut out: middle of lower photo. |
At the workshop, I gave out A4 copies of the image
along with things like colouring pencils, highlighters, post-it notes,
stickers, glue and scissors. I encouraged people to cut out particular aspects
of the scene that appealed to them. When I saw one of the participants cutting
out Hercules, I thought it was because he wanted to make some specific use of Hercules,
as a key figure amidst what is taking place. But, in fact, he was removing Hercules – cutting him out to
get rid of him as an intruder. By cutting out Hercules, what could be left were
the two women and the things that surround them.
Virtue and Pleasure come together
With this in mind – that is, an intervention which
leads to a scene between Pleasure and Hard Work, without any man in between
them – I would like to introduce something I found out about just over a week ago
while I was looking at the website for Emma Stafford’s Hercules Project. What I’d been especially interested in was the public engagement
event I wrote about in an earlier posting, where the participants updated
Hercules’s labours by creating postcards showing the hero dealing with various
contemporary issues.
The website also includes a presentation on the Choice of Hercules,
where Emma presents Hercules as a figure of Virtue and then, as one caught
between the two women. But what Emma also includes is the following badge,
where there is Pleasure and Virtue but… no man in the middle – no Hercules:
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| Gold admission badge presented to William Hogarth in 1733. Design attributed to Richard Yeo. Now in the British Museum. More details here. |
The badge was the “Perpetual Pass,” presented to Hogarth
for Vauxhall Gardens, the most extensive and most visited
of the London Pleasure Gardens. Visitors would need to be
respectably turned out for entrance into the Gardens which were, as described
in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1848),
set during their heyday, intended for:
The delight of all persons of reputation and taste.
The Gardens were spaces for Pleasure, but a
Pleasure for respectable-looking people – people of ‘Virtue’ though, and this
would be very Hogarthian – once darkness fell, the
Gardens were known to become space where ‘Vice’ took over…
 |
| Francis Jukes, A Concert in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (1732) after watercolour by Thomas Rowlandson |
On the badge, there is Voluptas (Pleasure) taking
the hand of Virtus (Virtue). Virtue turns in part towards Pleasure, her gaze at
once ‘demure’ and directed towards the other. The inscription, beside each
woman and on the scroll below, reads:
VIRTUS VOLUPTAS
FELICES UNA
VIRTUE PLEASURE
ONE HAPPINESS
Without Hercules, there can be a coming together of
Pleasure and Virtue. As early as the eighteenth century, the two women could be
envisaged without the man in the middle.
What the group of twenty-first century young women focused on was not the man but on the women – though they did see the women
as making advances towards the man. On Hogarth’s badge, meanwhile, the women
are interested not in some third person – some person who chooses one or other
of them. But there is a unity (‘una’).
Conclusions: Hope without Hercules?
There is a lot in all this that’s relevant to my
activities. For one thing, the three things I’ve discussed all signal that the activities
don’t need to centre on, or even include, Hercules. They can be concerned with Hercules – the hero who can stand for
classics and for classics as communicated to children, and the hero who keeps speaking
to ‘Western’ culture and all that can imply. But they don’t have to be. There is a strange
place, a site of pleasure, a site of hard work and where the two come together.
I shall be doing two things. I shall be embracing
Hercules as one who can speak to autistic experiences. I shall also be doing
what the participant at the workshop did: envisaging a scene without the hero
at its centre.
The ‘Hope’ I have been looking at over recent weeks
is concerned with Hercules as a Hope-Bearer but also with other sources of Hope
– a Hope that comes with the fostering of autistic spaces, where choices can be
made, but also where the terms of the Choice come together in a common
happiness.
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