The Voice that Travels from Vessels to Other Worlds: Extracting Narratives from the Cave of the Sibyl

Abstract

From caves, leaves, dust, to ampullae, the Sibyl of Cumae’s voice has travelled far from vessels and into other story-worlds in various material forms. While practicing as a female prophet in classical antiquity, her origin possesses no definite beginning but only allusions to an incomplete identity and liminal persona. The Sibyl of Cumae’s uncertain characteristics have rendered her an ideal figure for speculative interpretation over time, particularly through stories. Based on Vergil’s famous account in the Aeneid, the Sibyl of Cumae was imagined to be dispersing prophecies from inside a subterranean architecture: a cave in the ancient city of Cumae, Italy. With increasing interpretations of the Sibyl dealt through time, writers from the past have provided her material presence while oncoming generations continue to mold it to create something new amongst her absence. This thesis will critically examine the evolution of the Sibyl of Cumae’s character in a selection of seven texts from two separate timelines. Reading Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Petronius’s Satyricon, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, I find varied interpretations of this Sibyl united by a shared theme of isolation. Isolation, or the condition of separateness, becomes a motif to study in this thesis through form, material, emotion, and narrative. I unravel varied meanings and representations of isolation in the selected texts by examining the qualities of objects and architecture that have been associated with the Sibyl of Cumae in them including the cave, dust, ampulla, leaves, cage, and jar. I distinguish the qualities of decay, silence, and visibility from these objects and study their prominence across settings, characters and objects in the selected texts. This leads me to recognize how the Sibyl of Cumae has adapted into something beyond a corporeal presence by proxy of material entities of the physical world.