{"id":2491,"date":"2025-05-01T17:21:05","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T17:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=2491"},"modified":"2025-05-01T17:21:05","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T17:21:05","slug":"limbless-aphrodite-venus-worshipping-the-goddess-of-beauty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2025\/05\/01\/limbless-aphrodite-venus-worshipping-the-goddess-of-beauty\/","title":{"rendered":"Limbless Aphrodite-Venus: Worshipping the Goddess of Beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eugene Lee-Hamilton\u2019s poem \u201cTo The So-Called Venus of Milo\u201d explores the famous sculpture from the Hellenistic period of Ancient Greece, depicting Aphrodite, the goddess of love, sex, and beauty. The Venus de Milo<\/em> is a beloved statue which resides in the Louvre in Paris and has been extraordinarily well-protected throughout history by the French and lovers of the statue at large. It is also, and perhaps most importantly, not a perfect statue. Both of the goddess\u2019 arms have broken off over time, both before its discovery and excavation in 1820. And yet, Bettany Hughes refers to it as \u201cthe most replicated of all Aphrodite-Venuses around the globe\u201d (135) in her biography Venus and Aphrodite<\/em>. The Venus de Milo is an amputee, taking away the all-powerful allure of the gods and goddesses of Olympus. This becomes all the more important with the lens of Lee-Hamilton\u2019s own disability, neurasthenia, which was the physical manifestation of leg paralysis, in his case, from severe mental illness.<\/p>\n

In the first part of Lee-Hamilton\u2019s poem dedicated to the statue, he references the widespread praise of this particular statue. He writes, \u201cEmbraceless Beauty, Strength bereft of hands; \/ To whose high pedestal a hundred lands \/ Send rent of awe, and sons to stand beneath\u201d (3-5). The acknowledgement of just how popular this particular reference of Aphrodite had become is also interesting considering how relatively recently it had been discovered by the time that Lee-Hamilton was writing. Hughes refers to the Venus de Milo<\/em> as \u201ccherished with extraordinary care and chivalry\u201d (135). She, meaning Aphrodite, was cared for by the society that discovered her in a way that she was not by the society that created her. Even without her arms, she was a show of strength and a source of awe and wonder. In fact, it may even be argued that her allure came indeed from her very lack of arms. Her body had wondrously survived the ages, even if all of her limbs could not.<\/p>\n

This fascination with Venus de Milo<\/em> not in spite of, but in light of her disabled body, is well explored. Hughes writes, \u201c[C]ivilization is reveling in her castration\u2013\u2013the armless Venus feeds a ruin-lust\u201d (136). In the second part of Lee-Hamilton\u2019s poem does just this, although it may take a different tone than the \u201creveling\u201d that Hughes refers to. He imagines a variety of locations the arms of Venus de Milo may be in, all of them filled with hope and cultural significance. He writes of them lying \u201cwhere the Greek girls reap\u201d (17), tying in the importance of Aphrodite worship to ancient Greek girls and women. Alternatively, he wonders if the arms have been used to create mortar \u201cfor some Turkish tower \/ Which overshadowed Freedom for a time\u201d (24-25), much like the body that we do have was used as infill for a Roman wall (Hughes 135). By not just seeing these missing arms as a loss for the Venus de Milo<\/em> and those viewing her, but rather as pieces that must have served some great purpose in the world, Lee-Hamilton is allowing himself to imagine the lack of limbs as something still worthy of praise and adoration.<\/p>\n

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Eugene Lee-Hamilton\u2019s poem \u201cTo The So-Called Venus of Milo\u201d explores the famous sculpture from the Hellenistic period of Ancient Greece, depicting Aphrodite, the goddess of love, sex, and beauty. The Venus de Milo is a beloved statue which resides in the Louvre in Paris and has been extraordinarily well-protected throughout history by the French and … Continue reading Limbless Aphrodite-Venus: Worshipping the Goddess of Beauty<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5598,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135984],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5598"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}