Radicalizing the Myth: Amy Levy's Medea, the (Un)Assimilated Jewish Victorian Woman

Abstract

[eng] While most scholars specialized in Amy Levy appear to agree that Amy Levy's article 'The Ghetto at Florence' (1886) is her first contribution on a Jewish theme, this paper contends that Levy had already implicitly tackled her Jewish identity in her short drama Medea (1881), which subtly displays the full acknowledgment of her Jewish consciousness. This article reads her Medea to pinpoint racial issues and the poet's anxieties as an Anglo-Jewish woman struggling to be accepted in Victorian England. This reading surmises that Victorian Jews were seen as subjects colonized by western universal 'truths' and employs a postcolonial theoretical framework to explore Levy's Jewishness in her Medea, based on pioneering Frantz Fanon's (1925 - 1961) critique of the process of decolonization of the mind.