New Women on the Tragic Stage

97 Pages·2004·0.75 MB·English

by  Amanda Mathis

New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes
by
AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS
(Under the direction of Charles Platter)
ABSTRACT
As early as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, women were either recognized as “completed” by the
experience of marriage and motherhood or were perceived as “incomplete” if they failed to serve
in either of these capacities. Thus women in literature were often one portrayed as one of two
types, the parthenos (“unmarried woman,” “virgin”) or the gynē (“married woman”). In the
plays of Sophokles, however, women are often amalgams of the two types, with the traditional
characteristics of the virgin and the mother combining with and informing one another. It is my
intention to examine Sophokles’ transformative technique by analyzing the central female
characters of the Antigone and Trakhiniai—a virgin and a mother—to explore the changing
representation of women in fifth-century Athenian literature.

INDEX WORDS: Sophokles, Sophocles, Women, Motherhood, Telos, Antigone, Antigone,
Trakhiniai, Trachiniae, Deianeira
New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes

by

AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS
A.B., Baylor University, 2002

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF ARTS

ATHENS, GEORGIA
2004
© 2004
Amanda G. Seamans-Mathis
All Rights Reserved
New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes

by

AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS

Major Professor: Charles Platter
Committee: Nancy Felson
Naomi Norman

Electronic Version Approved:

Maureen Grasso
Dean of the Graduate School
The University of Georgia
August 2004
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people deserve special thanks for helping and supporting me during the writing of this
thesis. It was during Dr. Nancy Felson’s Sophokles class in Spring 2003 that I began to
formulate ideas for my thesis, and she has helped me greatly in fixing problems with my various
writings. Dr. Naomi Norman has given me a fresh perspective on women in the ancient world
from an archaeological standpoint, a topic with which I was not familiar before performing
research for this thesis. Dr. Charles Platter, my head thesis adviser, has been very patient with
my (only occasional!) procrastination, and has helped me to formulate my ideas and turn them
into something more than random musings on Sophokles. Last but not least, my husband Sean
has very patiently listened to each and every one of my ideas—good and bad—before I put them
down on paper, and encouraged me throughout my process of writing.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................................................iv
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................1
2 SOPHOKLES’ ANTIGONE.........................................................................................12
3 SOPHOKLES’ TRAKHINIAI.......................................................................................37
4 CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................75
WORKS CITED................................................................................................................................86
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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
In the literature of archaic and classical Greece, there is a discernible pattern of defining
women by their relationships to men. In epic poetry, for example, Homer’s Penelope is
variously identified as the daughter of Ikarios (κούρη Ἰκαρίοιο, Odyssey 1.328), wife of Odysseus
(Ὀδυσῆα, φίλον πόσιν, Od. 1.363), and mother of Telemakhos (µῆτηρ ἐµή, Od. 1.344); in the
dramatic tradition, Sophokles’ Deianeira is the daughter of Oineus (πατρὸς . . . Οἰνέως, Trakhiniai
6), wife of Herakles (λέχος . . . Ἡρακλεῖ κριτὸν, Trakh. 27), and mother of Hyllos (δίδαξον, µῆτηρ,
Trakh. 64); and the female patients of the Hippocratic corpus are usually identified only by the
names of their male relatives, such as “the maiden daughter of Daitharses” (τῆι ∆αιθάρσεος
θυγατρὶ παρθένωι, Epidemics 1.16) or “the wife of Mnesistratos” (Μνησιστράτου γυναικί,
Epidemics 1.17).1 Repeatedly, women are identified as the daughters and brides, wives and
mothers of men, but even within these categories they are usually divided into one of two distinct
groups: as Ken Dowden has stated, “females may be parthenoi (maidens) or gynaikes
(matrons),” but rarely anything in between.2 This distinction is particularly evident in the

1 On the general silencing of women’s names in the Hippocratic corpus, see, e.g., Lesley Dean-Jones, “Medicine:
The ‘Proof’ of Anatomy,” in Women in the Classical World: Image and Text, ed. Elaine Fantham et al. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 183, on a deceased patient referred to as “the niece of Temenes”: “even when the
patient died (as in this case) the physician avoided using her name and referred to her by her relationship to a man.”
Indeed, throughout the Hippocratic corpus, there is only one female patient mentioned by name: Melidia, the subject
of case study 14 in Epidemics 1. The other four women cited as case studies in Epidemics 1 are referred to as “the
wife of” (cases 4, 5, 11) or just “the woman” (case 13). A similar phenomenon occurs in Athenian legal documents
of the period. According to David Schaps’ “The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women’s Names” (CQ 27
[1977]: 323-30), the orators practiced “a deliberate avoidance of women’s names” (323), preferring instead “to call
[a woman] the relative of such-and-such man” (326). Women left unnamed “are generally ordinary women of the
citizen class” (326), but women who are named typically fall into three categories: “women of shady reputation,
women connected with the speaker’s opponent, and dead women” (328).

2 Ken Dowden, “Approaching Women through Myth: Vital Tool or Self-Delusion?” in Women in Antiquity: New
Assessments, ed. Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 46. Dowden’s analysis, like
mine, concerns primarily women of the upper class, since there is a relatively small amount of literature from the
archaic and classical periods concerning women of the lower classes. (The dichotomy given here could not, in any
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Homeric epics, in which the major female characters are typically either virgins (Nausikaä in the
Odyssey, Kassandra and Iphianassa in the Iliad) or mothers (Penelope, Arete, and the reclaimed
Helen in the Odyssey; Andromakhe and Hekabe in the Iliad), as if no transitional period between
virginity and maternity exists.

The telos gamou
Categorizing women by the dichotomy of maiden/matron, is, of course, inadequate, for
this sharp division of social roles allows no gap between marriageability and marriage, only an
abrupt transition from parthenos to gynē. In literature, this transition usually requires a
“definitive break from maidenhood”3 that is often quite dangerous, for it is at the moment of
marriage or, alternatively, defloration that a maiden is most susceptible to the effects of negative
forces such as physical mutation (Kallisto, Daphne), imprisonment/enslavement (Danaë,
Polyxena), rape (Kassandra by Aias, Helen by Theseus, Iole by Herakles), and even death
(Iphigeneia, Antigone, Glauke). A nubile girl’s increased susceptibility to destructive forces
renders virginity a time of crisis,4 and it is often portrayed as “a dangerous liminal state to be
passed through”5 and quickly resolved by marriage. Left unresolved, virginity can cause anxiety
as well as injury: in Odyssey 6, Alkinoös, father of the “untamed virgin” Nausikaä (παρθένος
ἀδµής, 6.109), understands his daughter’s sudden desire to go and wash the family’s laundry as

case, be applied to women classed as slaves, prostitutes, etc., and reflects only a literary, not a demographic,
scheme.)

3 Ibid., p. 55.

4 Matt Neuberg, “How Like a Woman: Antigone’s ‘Inconsistency,’ ” CQ 40.1 (1990): 67.

5 Simon Goldhill, “Character and Action, Representation and Reading: Greek Tragedy and its Critics,” in
Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature, ed. Christopher Pelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p.
104.

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an indication of interest in and anxiety over a future marriage (6.66-67); Greek medical writers
of the fifth century BCE believed that “parthenoi who, despite being ripe for marriage, remain
unmarried” suffer from spells of choking and falling and an “erotic fascination with death” that
can only be cured by an expedient marriage and pregnancy.6
In addition to curing the ills of maidenhood, marriage also represents the “normal goal”
of a girl’s life, by which she may obtain “access to full femininity.”7 Marriage first appears as a
“goal,” the Greek telos, in Homer’s Odyssey, when Penelope describes how the goddess
Aphrodite raised the orphan daughters of Pandareos, and “went to great Olympos, to Zeus who
delights in thunder, to ask for the telos of blooming marriage for the maidens” when they
reached nubile age (εὖτ’ Ἀφροδίτη δῖα προσέστιχε µακρὸν Ὄλυµπον,/ κούρηις αἰτήσουσα τέλος
θαλεροῖο γάµοιο,/ ἐς ∆ία τερπικέραυνον, 20.73-75). The phrase telos gamoio—in later Greek, telos
gamou—“can be safely assumed to mean ‘realization (solemnization) of marriage,’ ”8 but it
undoubtedly carries a weightier meaning as well. According to F.M.J. Waanders’ study of the
primary meanings of telos in Greek literature, the word connotes both the “ ‘realization,
completion’ ” of the state of matrimony and the “ ‘(physical) completeness, maturity’ ” of the
bride.9 Thus what Aphrodite requests for Pandareos’ daughters is not only the fulfillment of

6 Helen King, “Bound to Bleed: Artemis and Greek Women,” in Images of Women in Antiquity, ed. Averil Cameron
and Amélie Kuhrt, revised edn. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), p. 114.

7 J.-P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone
Books, 1988), p. 99.

8 F.M.J. Waanders, The History of ΤΕΛΟΣ and ΤΕΛΕΩ in Ancient Greek (Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner Publishing
Co., 1983), p. 55.

9 Ibid., p. 233. Cf. the interpretation supplied by the Archbishop Eustathius in his twelfth-century commentary on
the Odyssey: Τέλος δὲ γάµου ἢ ὁ γάµος περιφραστικῶς ἢ ἡ τεκνοπιΐα (“the telos of marriage [means], periphrastically,
the wedding or the production of children”). See Eustathii Archiepiscopi Thessalonicensis, Commentarii ad Homeri
Odysseam, vol. 1 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1960), ad loc. Od. 20.74.

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marriage, but also the fulfillment of femininity—physical completeness ensured by the sexual
aspect of the marital relationship and, ideally, the production of children.
In this system of thought, a woman either becomes complete through the experience of
marriage and motherhood or remains unfulfilled by failing to serve in either capacity. Thus a
particular plotline can be applied to the proper, or “normal” course of a female’s life in archaic
literature: when a parthenos reaches nubile age, she marries and has children, becoming, in the
process, a gynē, a complete woman. Deviations from this plotline signify a rupture in or
frustration of the normal story pattern, and often confirm the precariousness of the maiden’s
position: the daughters of Pandareos themselves, at precisely the moment when they should
achieve the telos gamou, are carried away by “seizing stormwinds” (ἅρπυιαι ἀνηρείψαντο, Od.
20.77) that “g[ive] them over into the care of the hateful Furies” (ἔδοσαν στυγερῆισιν ἐρίνυσιν
ἀµφιπολεύειν, Od. 20.77-78)—barren, sterile, and eternally virginal powers that “create sterility in
all of nature.”10 Whisked away by the winds, the maidens are prevented from making the
“normal” transition from parthenoi to gynaikes; like the Furies themselves, they will remain
incomplete, forever distinct from women like Penelope or Arete, who obtain completion through
marriage and motherhood.

Evaluating Women: Character Types
In addition to the classification of women as complete or incomplete, the archaic system
of representing the female contains certain subgroups that define the possible courses that a
female’s life may take. In literature, these courses attach themselves to certain character types
with underlying positive or negative values; the distribution of these character types is, in turn,

10 Froma I. Zeitlin, “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia,” Arethusa 11 (1978): 159.
On the Furies as representatives of “negative virginity” and creators of sterility, see ibid., pp. 158-60.

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