Female Acts in Greek Tragedy

Introduction

What is it about women that interests Mr. Jacquot? "I was born a man," Mr. Jacquot said, "and women are a part of humanity that is at once familiar and very, very strange to me. It's difficult for a man to ask the question, what is a man. It's as if the question just doesn't arise. Or as if we already know the response, and it's not necessarily amusing. But a woman can ask herself the question, what is a woman. I try to respond to that question with the female characters I invent and the actresses I film. And they always lead me to further questions."
(French filmmaker Benoit Jacquot, New York Times, August 2, 1998)

GREEK tragedy was written and performed by men and aimed--perhaps not exclusively if women were present in the theater--at a large, public male audience.1 Masculine identity and conflicts remain central to the enterprise, but the texts often explore or query these issues through female characters and the culturally more marginal positions that they occupy. Such indirection is basic to the genre as a whole. Tragic plots borrow from the whole repertoire of Greek myths, often myths about cities other than Athens, and the plays take place in the remote past. The heroic kings who dominate the cities of Greek tragedies no more directly reflect the leaders of Athenian democracy than the active and assertive women who make public choices and determine the outcome of the plot of so many Greek tragedies resemble their more restricted Athenian counterparts. At the same time, in part through deploying deliberate anachronisms or overlapping features of the fictional past and the lived present, the tragedies provoke an implicit dialogue between present and past,2 and the enduring fascination of these stories of powerful aristocratic families for a democratic polis (city-state) requires explanation.

The study of tragic women is both more limited and in a sense more elusive than that of tragic men. Tragedy at least makes a pretense of knowing what women are and how they should act, and has a repertoire of clich�s to draw on in describing them. As a category, women are a "tribe" apparently less differentiated as individuals than men; paradoxically, they are both more embedded in the social system and marginal to its central institutions.3 Ideally, their speech and action should be severely limited, since they are by nature incapable of full social maturity and independence (see III.1). At the same time, tragedy generically prefers representing situations and behavior that at least initially invert, disrupt, and challenge cultural ideals. Although many female characters in tragedy do not violate popular norms for female behavior, those who take action, and especially those who speak and act publicly and in their own interest, represent the greatest and most puzzling deviation from the cultural norm.

These female interventions would be less puzzling if they could be explained simply as inversions of the norm designed to be cautionary demonstrations of the cultural consequences of stepping out of line. Yet, as we shall see, this is not consistently the case; and even when it is, the repercussions of female speech and action and the ways in which they are represented raise an unexpectedly broad and disconcerting set of questions. For this reason, recent critics, including myself, have hypothesized that female characters are doing double duty in these plays, by representing a fictional female position in the tragic family and city and simultaneously serving as a location from which to explore a series of problematic issues that men prefer to approach indirectly and certainly not through their own persons.4 In this sense, the female acts investigated in this book are fe(male) acts designed not only by but for men.

Women played a significant role in Athenian culture as reproducers of children, as participants in public and private religious rituals and festivals, and as caretakers within households. Their most important and active tragic interventions tend to reflect these realities, but with a critical difference, since female characters can exercise an independence and a latitude not, at least ideally, permitted to them outside fiction. This book looks first at the tragic representation of women in burial ritual, above all as lamenters of the dead (I), and second, at male and female responses toward and attempts to negotiate the contradictory marriage system that heavily governed Athenian private lives (II and IV). The third and largest part (III, 1-6, the core of the Martin Lectures) deals with ethical interventions by women at different stages of their reproductive lives (as virgin, wife, and mature mother) in the form of choices made or attempts to persuade others to act in their behalf. Each part lays the historical and interpretive groundwork for its own section, but the issues discussed in earlier sections continue to play a role in later ones. Thus, for example, III.2 deals with the ethics of women's role as lamenters of the dead in Sophocles' Electra, and III.4 takes up the challenge made by Clytemnestra to the institution of marriage. Part IV, which addresses Euripides' Alcestis and Helen, brings together all the themes of the book but with a special focus on marriage.

In the case of each of the major topics discussed in this book we have evidence external to tragedy, especially in prose texts, that these were areas that the culture recognized as not only central but somehow problematic in relation to women. Starting from the archaic period, for example, Athens more than once attempted to control and curtail women's public role in death ritual (I). The emerging city also passed legislation concerning marriage and inheritance and evidence for tensions over and violations of these legal restrictions appears throughout the classical period. For example, Pericles' citizenship law of 451-450 B.C.E, which restricted citizenship to those with two citizen parents, apparently lapsed and was repassed in 403; inheritance law, which aimed to insure the continuity of each household, including those left only with female heirs, met with abuses and controversies that emerge repeatedly in fourth-century court cases (II). Finally, women were not allowed to exercise legal autonomy; hence they normally did not make significant social and economic choices without the supervision of a guardian. Yet philosophers can raise questions about the advisability of women's extreme ethical subordination, and court cases allow us to catch glimpses of women exercising greater autonomy within the household than we might have expected from Athenian ideology (III.6).5

The discussion of tragedy in each part of the book takes place in the context of this historical evidence, and permits us better to understand how tragedy deviates from or responds to cultural norms. Thus, as we shall see, tragic lamenters may violate or be forced to conform to the restrictions of the funerary legislation, tragic men and women may escape or implicitly confront the limits of Athenian marriage and inheritance law, and tragic women may make significant and sometimes public choices (commonly but by no means exclusively relating to self-sacrifice or revenge) in the absence of male guardians.6 Although the plays do not allow their audience to forget the limits imposed on women in real life,7 the interventions of female characters go beyond being cautionary examples of the dangers of permitting independence to women. Because we have access to the cultural clich�s and the expectations that defined women for men, examining their role in tragedy allows us to address a more limited and accessible issue than we would encounter in looking at male roles in the same genre and to begin to define more fully what kind of response tragedy is making to the environment in which it was performed.

Conceptions of Tragic Women

Before returning to a more detailed discussion of the approaches that I adopt in this book, I would like to review briefly scholarly progress on conceptions of tragic women to date. The earliest phases of this investigation were largely historical. Scholars puzzled over a range of apparently contradictory evidence on the subject of Attic women, and especially their seemingly anomalous representation in drama.8 Leaving aside women's strikingly assertive and even rebellious behavior, the pervasive presence of female characters on the public stage in a society that preferred its own women to have as limited a public reputation as possible was even in antiquity something of a surprise.9 As early as the second century C.E., the writer Lucian (De Saltatione 28) commented that there were more women than men in these plays; Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon (1.8) remarks on the many plots women have contributed to the tragic stage, as they kill the men they love or hate; only one extant tragedy lacks a woman (Sophocles' Philoctetes) and female choruses outnumber their male counterparts in the remaining plays (twenty-one to ten).10 Moreover, tragedy apparently expands on and often makes more controversial the roles that mythical women played in archaic literature.11

By now, the probable relation between life and the tragic stage is better understood; the gap between drama and what we believe to be lived reality exists, but we can envision it on terms that make fiction part of the same social universe.12 From a generic perspective Greek drama does not directly reflect contemporary life but a remote, imaginary, and aristocratic world that often deliberately inverts or distorts the cultural norm; on the other hand, such inversions testify to an implicit norm, and tragedy often either reminds its audience of or abides by contemporary standards. Thus female characters can be admonished to stay in their place within and keep silent; men express outrage at a female challenge; aberrant women are labeled as masculine.13 Finally, the Athenian audience must have experienced these female characters in a fashion that grew out of their psychological, political, and social lives.

On the one hand, Attic women were formally excluded from the political and military life of their city; this exclusion was important given the particular significance that Athens' radical democracy placed on participation in public life. They could not attend assemblies, serve on juries, or even speak in court. Nor did they receive the kind of education that would have permitted them to do so.14 Tragedy, even though it is set in the remote past, largely respects these restrictions with occasional exceptions. Aeschylus' Clytemnestra, for example, is imagined to have exercised power legitimately during her husband's absence at Troy and she later becomes coruler of Argos with Aegisthus; characters like Euripides' foreign Medea or his priestess' daughter Melanippe (Melanippe Sophe) lay claim to a remarkable feminine wisdom and many tragic women argue with great rhetorical sophistication.

Although a citizen wife was necessary for the production of legitimate children, women were not registered at birth as citizens in the city's phratries (clans).15 Their "citizenship" was exercised not politically but religiously. Priestesses of many important cults were citizen women, and the form of female participation undertaken in a range of civic cults could depend on citizenship.16 Tragic women sometimes seem to confine their horizons strictly to a domestic world, but others clearly view themselves as citizens and even act for their state. Antigone and Ismene clash over exactly these priorities at the beginning of Sophocles' Antigone (see III.3). Euripides' sacrificial virgins (III.1) and persuasive mothers (III.6) can pointedly subordinate family to civic concerns. Tragedy thus implicitly adopts a more inclusive and symbolic view of citizenship than those historians who stress a strictly political definition.17

The respectable, citizen women of the middle and upper middle classes about which our sources provide the majority of the evidence ideally spent their lives indoors or with women in the immediate neighborhood and were primarily oriented to domestic affairs.18 Even shopping or fetching water was generally done by men or slaves. Yet women also came out of the house frequently to attend religious events and were aware of much that went on in the public world. Tragedy occurs outside the stage building and thus putatively, and sometimes pointedly, stages its women in public or religious spaces. Nevertheless, as Easterling and others have stressed,19 the plays often treat the spaces before the stage building as in essence domestic and women generally do not stray far from the stage doorway.

As lifelong legal minors, Attic women were meant to make important decisions under the supervision of a guardian (kurios), although they could and apparently did exercise influence on family matters concerning adoption and inheritance and may have offered opinions on public affairs (see III.6). Women married young and ideally did not choose their spouses, manage their dowries, divorce without the approval of their kin, or conduct financial transactions over the value of one medimnos of barley (enough food to sustain a family for several days). Tragic women, however, frequently make important autonomous decisions, often in the absence of male guardians, and can deliberately flout the authority of their men. Thus tragedy apparently deliberately violates cultural norms, but many of these female decisions (though there are glaring exceptions) involve domestic rather than public life.