Sex and the Senses: the Poetic Process in Aristophanes

SEX AND THE SENSES: THE POETIC PROCESS IN ARISTOPHANES’ THESMOPHORIAZUSAE A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Eryn L. Pritchett Aldo Tagliabue, Director Graduate Program in Classics Notre Dame, Indiana May 2019 © Copyright 2019 Eryn L. Pritchett CONTENTS Introduction .......................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Examining the Prologue ........................................................ 8 1.1 The Senses: Expressed and Suppressed ................................. 8 1.2 Senses and the Sexes ........................................................... 18 1.3 The Metatheatrical Uses of the Senses and Sexes ................. 26 1.4 Relative Tests the Theory …………………………………………....32 1.5 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………38 Chapter 2: Questioning the Stability of the Sensual Senses .................. 40 2.1 Recapping the Theory ........................................................... 40 2.2 The Gendered Verbs of Speaking .......................................... 42 2.3 Agathon, a Confusion of Sexes .............................................. 48 2.4 The Women’s Response ........................................................ 51 Conclusion .......................................................................................... 61 Bibliography ........................................................................................ 64 ii INTRODUCTION The Thesmophoriazusae, crafted in 411 BCE by Aristophanes, is centered around Euripides’ attempts to rescue himself from the women’s wrath at the Thesmophoria festival. These women are upset with Euripides for his portrayal of women in tragedies since he calls them “adulterous whores, easy sluts, wine-os, traitresses, gossips, good for nothings, and a great curse to man.”1 They have decided to kill him, but Euripides plans to get Agathon to infiltrate the festival to save his life. Unfortunately for Euripides, Agathon is not interested and his Relative must fill that role. Relative is quickly found out, and the rest of the action consists of Euripides and Relative acting out tragic rescue plots. This comedy, although it “contains considerable literary and dramatic criticism, in the form of both explicit commentary and parody,”2 1 τὰς μοιχοτρόπους, τὰς ἀνδρεραστίας καλῶν, τὰς οἰνοπότιδας, τὰς προδότιδας, τὰς λάλους, τὰς οὐδὲν ὑγιές, τὰς μέγ᾽ ἀνδράσιν κακόν: (Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, 391-393). All translations are my own, with assistance from the commentaries of Austin and Olson (2009) and Sommerstein (2015). 2 Gamel, "Introduction,” 319. 1 had been ignored by many scholars until recently. In 1972, just to give an example, Dover lamented that it “has nothing to say about making peace.”3 In terms of Aristophanic contests, scholars preferred for decades the Frogs to Thesmophoriazusae. When concerning dramatic women the Lysistrata was their first choice. Other scholars, then, starting from Lever, believed that the play was weak, “finding the conflict not so clear cut since the idea at stake… is only the stepping off point for the fun that follows.”4 For Norwood, although in comparison with his contemporaries he thought highly of the play, the extreme nature of the obscenity was an obstacle.5 By 2001 however, increasing interest in the Thesmophoriazusae reversed the scholarly trend. Building from Bain and Adams on Menander and Latin comedy, Sommerstein argued that features of speech, such as obscenity, are used to mark masculine and feminine speech.6 Moreover, feminist scholars focused their attention on this play’s portrayal of gender relations, while others stressed the connection 3 Dover, 1972, 169. 4 Lever, 1956, 120. 5 For his exceptional appreciation of this play, see Norwood, 1932, 253-254.: the Thesmophoriazusae is “perhaps the world’s finest masterpiece … that never misses a point, never overstresses it.” 6 Sommerstein, 1995, 63. 2 between this comedy and the ritual context of the Athenian Thesmophoria festival.7 This rise of interest has resulted in an outpouring of literature on both feminist and performance studies about the Thesmophoriazusae. Feminist criticism is dominated by the views of both Taaffe and Zeitlin. The former attempts to show that while most scholars deem tragedy as the realm of the female, and comedy that of the male, the Thesmophoriazusae proves that “comedy must have femininity to exist.”8 Zeitlin looks at the co-dependence of gender and genre and at the difference between the representation of females and males in comedy and tragedy, intersecting around the concepts of femininity, comedy and mimesis.9 According to Zeitlin’s interpretation, “a woman both imitates and is imitated;” furthermore, this play offers an investigation of the self through theater.10 On the other hand, the Thesmophoriazusae has been analyzed also from a performative perspective. In a special issue of the American 7 Gamel, “Introduction”, 320. 8 Taaffe, 1993, 102. 9 See Zeitlin, 1981, 301-327. 10 Zeitlin, 1996, 14. 3 Journal of Philology published in 2002,11 scholars explored the performance of the Thesmophoriazusae. Both Tzanetou and Stehle focus on the 411 BCE performance, with concern to Athenian culture and theater. Van Steen shows the varied readings and responses provided by the twentieth-century Greek audience to the script and how it relates to their cultural history. Scharffenberger, looking at Arrowsmith’s translation, Euripides Agonistes, examines the connection between the translator’s corpus and the context of his time. Finally, Gamel looks at the Thesmophoriazusae from the perspective of an actor, director, and playwright. While gender theory, mimesis, metatheater, and intertextuality have proved to be extremely valuable avenues of discovery, the prologue itself has received little attention. Clements has studied this section from a philosophical perspective, arguing that the frequent mention of both hearing and seeing echoes Parmenides’ reflection on the topic.12 While Clements’ analysis is helpful, it does not address the dramatic function implicit in both the initial joke and the first 200 lines. 11 Vol. 123, No. 3, Autumn, 2002. 12 See Clements, 2014, 1: “when theatre turns inward to theorize itself explicitly [metatheater] … it does so using the lenses of one particular philosophical framework." 4 We should now examine how the different approaches outlined above can shed light on the prologue. What more can be said about the repetition of hearing and seeing? Does Aristophanes use other senses, and if so, why? Moreover, by the time the real action of the comedy begins, in which Relative infiltrates the Thesmophoria, over 200 lines have passed. What is the significance of such a long prologue? Is it an introduction to the main themes of the text or something more? This thesis offers a new interpretation of the Thesmophoriazusae which further explores the transvestment of characters within this comedy. I will argue that the repeated use of sex and senses language creates a reciprocal relationship of stabilization and deconstruction that allows for a more sophisticated reading of the transvestment. In chapter one, I analyze the sex and senses language inside the prologue and how they connect to a metatheatrical reading of the play.13 In chapter two, I focus on how this interpretation sheds new light on the assembly scene. The connection between the sex and senses which is established by chapter one creates subtle expectations for the audience, which 13 Metatheatrical as defined by metadrama (metatheatre) in the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (3 ed.): “Drama about drama, or any moment of self‐ consciousness by which a play draws attention to its own fictional status as a theatrical pretense”. 5 Aristophanes is able to challenge in the assembly scene, so that gender identity is always unstable, always unsure. Throughout this thesis, I combine feminist criticism mostly inspired by Foley with Revermann’s performance theory and with the recently developed interest in multisensorial aspects of ancient Greek and Roman literature.14 Building off the work of structural and cultural anthropologists, some have seen Aristophanic plays through the equation “female is to male as nature is to culture,”15 which implies that they are distinct categories with no overlap. Foley claims, conversely, that this equation does not show an appropriate relationship with Greek culture and cannot fully represent reality. She claims that the dynamic is between oikos and polis, female and male, nature and culture, and that this is a reciprocal relationship, that functions both individually and collectively.16 By showing how these dichotomies work together, Foley provides the framework for understanding the connection between the senses and the sexes, which will be a key point of my analysis of the Thesmophoriazusae. 14 For an influential study which contributed to the development of this approach, see Butler and Purves 2013, and all the other volumes of The Senses in Antiquity series. 15 Taaffe, 1993, 24. 16 Foley, 1982, 5. 6 Performance studies is also required to understand the relationship between the senses and the sexes. Revermann asserts that the way to understand the absurdism of the comedy is to look at how it is “created, engineered, and managed” to understand its meaning within its own context.17 By applying Revermann’s performance theory to the use of senses, I will analyze how Aristophanes repeatedly

Load more