The nineteenth century produced some of the greatest and most memorable heroines, both on the page and on the stage—particularly the operatic stage, where the various types of femininity established by the Greeks, from virginal innocence to violent vengefulness, were given a powerful new mode of expression. During the course of this seminar, we will do a close reading of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary—a character whose unhappiness and ultimate fate result, in great part, from her indiscriminate consumption of literature about women. Each of these three sessions will also be twined around an opera that further explored cultural models of femininity: Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, about a innocent girl driven to madness and murder by the venal machinations of the men around her; Verdi’s La Traviata, in which a “fallen” woman redeems herself (we must ask: in whose eyes?) through self-sacrifice; and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, whose heroine travels an unforgettable arc from virginal naivete to tragic self-awareness.
This course will cover the following texts: Madame Bovary, Lucia di Lammermoor, La Traviata, Madame Butterfly.
Three one-hour sessions: January 7, 14, and 21. All sessions will start at 7pm EDT. Memberships begin at $99 (excluding Eventbrite fees). Full members and auditors will have access to recordings of each session that may be viewed after the live sessions conclude.
About Daniel Mendelsohn
Matt Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning author, critic, essayist, and translator. His eleven books include the international bestsellers An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a translation, with commentary, of the Modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy; and three collections of essays, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones (2018). Over the past thirty years. Mr. Mendelsohn has contributed over three hundred essays, reviews, articles, and translations to numerous publications, most frequently The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, and has been a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, and BBC Culture. His writing for mainstream publications covers a wide range of subjects, from Classical civilization to contemporary literature, as well as film, theater, opera, and television. Mr. Mendelsohn’s honors include the National Jewish Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Prose Style, the Society for Classical Studies Presidents’ Medal, Princeton University’s James Madison Medal, the Prix Médicis in France and the Malaparte Prize in Italy, that country’s highest literary honor for foreign authors. In 2022, he was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France. Since 2019, he has been the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports writers of nonfiction, essay, and criticism.
Daniel Mendelsohn, the Charles Ranlett Flint professor of Humanities at Bard College, lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. His translation of Homer’s Odyssey was published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2025.
About this series
The figure of the tragic heroine—suffering, abject, grandiose, vengeful, self-sacrificing, murderous, noble, seductive—has gripped the Western imagination for nearly thirty centuries, from the Homeric epics to twentieth-century cinema and theater. Our cultural obsession with these characters raises a compelling question: Why have male authors focused so consistently on the representation of suffering females—often for the benefit of male audiences? In this four-part NYRSeminar, New York Review of Books Editor-at-Large Daniel Mendelsohn will take participants through a series of close readings of major works that established and then developed our female literary archetypes— from Homer’s Odyssey to representative works of Greek tragedy, and from the nineteenth-century novel and opera to four major works of twentieth-century theater—as we explore the aesthetic nature and ideological roots of this cultural preoccupation.
