Jane Ellen Harrison's 'Handmaiden No More': Victorian ritualism and the fine arts

Victorians were fascinated by ancient ritual; they studied it, depicted it, and frequently reenacted it. Artists painted enormous works celebrating both Christian and pagan rites. Musicians and dancers revived the antique Morris dances. Theosophical practitioners engaged in reenactments of Egyptian and other Near Eastern ceremonies. Like so many other curiosities gathered from a vastly expanding empire, the rituals of ancient and primitive peoples, oddly enough, intrigued some of the most sophisticated members of an increasingly secularized society. Although the late nineteenth century is frequently characterized as a period during which many members of British society experienced a "crisis of faith," it was actually a period of vital and intense awareness about spirituality and matters of religion including sacred behaviors. Some scholars, while personally disaffected from traditional religions, nonetheless acknowledged the rich phenomenology of the religious experiences of the past and sought ways to incorporate it into meaningful contemporary discourse. This dissertation examines the impact of this heightened interest in ancient ritual on fine arts theories and productions of the time that, in turn, influenced the work of classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison.;Harrison's theories about art and ritual are prime examples of the cultural shift in perceptions about ritual experience and expressions of spirituality that occurred during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on her first-hand examination of ancient material culture, Harrison posited theories about Greek religion that precipitated revised notions about sacred images and ritual reenactments. In her 1913 book Ancient Art and Ritual, she challenged the weighty iconoclasm of the post-Reformation Protestantism she scorned. She deftly proposed a reintegration of ritual art of a less conventional sort into what she perceived to be the depleted fabric of social and cultural life among her contemporaries. Her work deftly relocated the ritual experience within a fine arts context where its relevance for an increasingly secularized community was reframed as a new type of spirituality. Harrison's investigations into the origins of art and ritual revealed a former time and, through her, encouraged a future practice wherein art was no longer a mere handmaiden to religion; instead, art was a religion.