sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

For Galanaki, Eleni’s disguise and cross‐dressing is related to her encounter with theatre via her
father’s business. There she came across, Galanaki believes, to the art of acting and transforming. 21
There she learned from the actors and actresses that, each time a role ends, a new character is about
to be born. Galanaki, thus, stages Eleni’s life as a series of roles until her “post‐life life”, as she calls it,
that is, her life in history and art. However, this staging keeps the role of the protagonist and key
narrator to the aged Eleni, who charts her life backwards. Moreover, she denies her body for the
sake of her art 22 and chooses for her companions the wind, the sea, the fire, her cat, her old maid.
Galanaki’s Eleni, through her mourning rituals and mnemonic journey, seeks to heal her tormented
soul and to restore women’s memory, presence and awareness in history. 23
“My art is to me my whole life” Eleni declared in a letter from 1862. 24 In her “Self‐portrait” of
1850, when still a (male) student at the Orbeck School in Rome, she painted herself in profile and
fully concetrated to the act of painting. The art historian Dora Markatou claims that:
A profile portrait does not necessarily presuppose the presence of a viewer, nor does it
give an idealized or formal image of the subject, as is the case with frontal portraits. What
interests the artist is achieving a process of individualization and giving the image a
biographical function. From this point of view we are looking at a self‐portrait of Eleni
conceived as a conscious attempt to record her exploits in art in painted form and to
transpose her opposition to male privilege to a symbolic level. 25
In the texts discussed, Eleni Altamura lived a life of excessive theatricality and high symbolism; her
narrative body became the body of history – not her story – for Greek feminist thought and women’s
writing, the path from an early feminism to gender construction.
Keywords: Biographical literature, Gender construction, Historical women, Art
Dr Ioulia PIPINIA
School of Drama, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
ipipinia@thea.auth.gr
Notes
1
The year of her birth is still uncertain; for a detailed account of her life and photographs of her
paintings, see Galanaki, “‘My art is to me my whole life…’,” 46‐81.
2
Parren, “Spetses and Spetsiotides: Eleni Altamura, A΄,” 1.
3
Galanaki, “‘My art is to me my whole life…’”, 65.
4
Parren, “Eleni Altamura, Β΄,” 1.
5
Parren also wrote an obituary for Altamura in her journal, in 1900, where she again stressed
Eleni’s boldness as well as sad life; “Dyo megalai nekrai,” 2‐4.
6
See Varikas, I exegersi ton Kyrion,294‐340; Psarra, “To mythistorima tis cheirafetisis”, 407‐86;
Anastasopoulou, I syneti apostolos tis gynaikeias cheirafesias, 124‐134.
7 All parts were first printed in series in The Ladies’ Newspaper; The Emancipated and The Witch were
also published in book form.
8 Parren, I cheirafetimeni, 40‐44, 288.
9
Anastasopoulou, “Feminist Discourse…,” 9.
10
As quoted in Anastasopoulou, “Feminist Discourse…,”18.
11
Avdela and Psarra, “Engendering ‘Greekness’,” 75.
12
Tarsouli, Eleni Altamura, 16.
13
Ibid, 18.
14
Ibid, 34, 36, 41.
15
Ibid, 17, 34.
16
Steiner, O thanatos tis tragodias, 234‐240.