Imagined Mothers: The Construction of Italy, Ancient Greece, and Anglo-American Hegemony

Abstract

This dissertation offers a new perspective on Roman appropriations of ancient Greek culture for the construction of cultural hegemony in modern Italy, Britain, and the US. By reading a vast selection of canonical ancient Greek and Latin texts written between the fifth century B.C.E. and the second century C.E., I argue that Greece has consistently been imagined—and has imagined itself—as “mother and nurse” to Rome. As I will demonstrate, given the patriarchal nature of these societies, it is the gendering of Greece as female that allows Rome to get around the problem of priority, by positioning itself as the “rightful” (i.e., masculine) heir to Greek cultural hegemony. However, the discourse around Greece’s metaphorical mothering of Rome is not at all a unilateral Roman imposition, but a dialectical creation: originating in fifth-century B.C.E. Athenian autochthony myths, this discourse is also espoused by Greek authors under Roman rule, because it allows for Greek claims of cultural primacy to remain intact. While the role of “classical” culture in justifying modern Western claims to superiority has been studied extensively, the principal aim of this dissertation is to uncover the importance of gendered metaphors to this discourse. Taking Italy’s relationship with Britain and the US over the long nineteenth century as a case study, I contend that Italy is constructed as a maternal presence in British travel writing, as well as American literature on Italian migration. Taking the dialectic between ancient Greece and Rome as its model, an imagined relationship of filiation with Italy as a “classical” land frames its culture as part of the “rightful” inheritance of the British and American empires. This in turn facilitates the construction of British and American identities as masculine. However, an analysis of the recurring trope of Italy as a “mother and nurse” in Italian texts from Dante to turn of the twentieth century reveals Italy’s own investment in this discourse, since it allows for Italian claims of primacy to remain intact, as in the case of ancient Greece. By tracing this same trope through colonial and diasporic Italian literature and film, I argue that imagining Italy as a “mother-land” enables nationalist discourse to cast Italy is cast as a martyr to whom everything is owed. This trope is then used to justify Italian participation in settler-colonialism in the US and colonialism in Africa. By deconstructing the long history of mothering metaphors as a rhetorical stratagem in Western imperialism, this study makes an innovative contribution to the study of how gender, race and hegemony are constructed and performed within it.