Whiteness in ruins: Victorian women writers in Greece

What does it mean to study the role of Greece in Victorian popular culture in the wake of widespread debates around the “decolonisation” of the Humanities? As representations of Ancient Greece popularised in the Victorian period find new expressions in right wing propaganda that uses the classics to undergird white supremacy, how can a return to Victorian representations of Greece open new frontiers in the resistance to structural racism? This chapter considers how British women’s travel writing about Greece in the Victorian period provides a unique insight into the “undisciplined” writing of women writers that can open questions about the representation of race, gender, and sexuality in the nineteenth century. With few women having access to learning Ancient Greek, the in-person experience of Greece was often framed through dissonance and disappointment. The chapter argues that these moments of failure in women’s travel writing about Greece offer an ambivalent commentary on the value of the classics, while opening spaces for alternative routes to understanding the affective power of ruins.