Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama Author(S): Froma I

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Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama Author(s): Froma I. Zeitlin Source: Representations, No. 11 (Summer, 1985), pp. 63-94 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928427 . Accessed: 16/01/2014 14:04

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FROMA I. ZEITLIN

Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality,and the Feminine in Greek Drama

FOR A SPECIMEN OF SHEER theatricalpower, it wouldbe difficult to matchthe climactic scene of Euripides'Bacchae (788-861) wherePentheus at lastcomes under the spell of hisadversary, the god Dionysus,and acknowledges his secretdesire to spyupon thewomen of Thebes who haveleft the city to go as maenadsto themountain. His violentantagonism toward the women who, in abandoningtheir homes, children, and domestictasks, have challenged the civic, masculineauthority of the king gives way to a suddensoftening of will-a yielding to the cunningwiles of the god disguisedon stageas the Asiaticstranger, the leaderof hisown troops of maenads.This firstsurrender is followedby another. Givingup now his originalintention to marshalhis forcesfor an open combat of menagainst women, Pentheus gives up his stubbornclaim to an unequivocal masculineidentity. To see whatthe women are doingwithout himself being seen, Pentheusmust trade his hoplite military tactics for an undercoveroperation that involvesadopting a deviousstratagem and assuminga remarkabledisguise. He mustlet the god takehim inside the palace and dresshim as a womanin a flowing wig and headdress,a long pleatedrobe and belt,to whichhe adds the typical insigniaof the maenads-the dappled fawnskinand ritualthyrsus. When the god completesthis elaborate toilette, Pentheus will also resembleDionysus himself,whose effeminate appearance the kinghad earliermocked.' But as much as theymight seem doubletsof one another,the powerrelations between them have been decisivelyreversed. Now Dionysuswill turn Pentheus from the one whoacts to theone whois actedupon, from the one whowould inflict pain and suffering,even death,on theother, to theone who willundergo those experi- enceshimself. For now,however, the preliminary sign of Pentheus'total defeat, firstat the handsof Dionysusand thenat the handsof thewomen, is givento us on stagein thevisual feminization of Pentheuswhen he is inducedagainst all inhibitionsof shameto adopt thecostume and gesturesof thewoman. But iffeminization is theemblem of Pentheus'defeat, Dionysus' effeminacy is a signof his hiddenpower. Here are twomales, cousins in factthrough their genealogicalties, both engaged in a masculinecontest for supremacy. One, however,gains mastery by manipulatinga feminizedidentity and theother is van-

REPRESENTATIONS 11 * Summer 1985 ? THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 63

This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions quished when he finallysuccumbs to it. What we mightperceive in theirensemble at the moment when the two males appear togetheron stage in similardress is an instructivespectacle of the inclusivefunctions of the femininein the drama- one on the side of femininityas power and the other on the side of femininity as weakness. Pentheus, firstashamed of wearing women's clothing,and terrifiedthat he make a ridiculous spectacle of himselffor all the cityto see, now has a fleeting intimationof the new force he has acquired, exultingin the surge of unnatural physicalstrength that suffuseshim and dreaming of uprooting mountainswith his bare hands. But under the god's gentleprodding, he just as eagerlyabandons his desire forviolence to acquiesce withpleasure in the contrarytactics of hiding and deception thatwill confrontthe women on theirown terms (953-56). The momentof triumphand confidence,however, is brief.We knowalready in advance what the fateof Pentheuswill be once the feminizedgod Dionysus,who playshis role to perfection,delivers over his disguised victim,his man clumsilyconcealed in women's dress, to the "real" women who will tear the imposter apart in a terribleritual sparagmos, while the god revertsto his functionof divine spectator at the drama he himselfhas arranged on stage. I have chosen to begin withthe robing of Pentheus,for beyond its dramatic impact withinthe contextof the play,the mechanics of this scene also suggests in its details a wider and more emblematicset of significations.These referboth to the conditionsof Dionysiac ritual itselfas a deadly version of initiationinto the mysteriesof the god's worshipand to the conditionsof the theaterof Dionysus and the accepted terms of its artisticrepresentations.2 For the first,Pentheus mustbe dressed as a woman for consecrationto the god as the surrogatebeast- victimhe willbecome in the ritualon the mountain;for the second, the costuming of Pentheus reminds us that the theater requires mimeticdisguise by which it creates and maintainsits statusas dramaticfestival.3 Thus throughthis scene we arrive at the dynamicbasis of Greek drama, catchinga momentaryglimpse of the secretsof its ritual prehistoryas it merges with and is imitatedby the techniques of the theater.In particular,the fact that Pentheus dons a femininecostume and rehearsesin itbefore our eyes exposes perhaps one of the mostmarked featuresof Greek theatricalmimesis, namely that men are the only actors in this civic theater; in order to representwomen on stage, men must alwaysput on a femininecostume and mask.4 What this means is that it is not a woman who speaks or acts for herselfand in herselfon stage; it is alwaysa man who imper- sonates her.5 Stillfurther, if we also consider thatin order to directthe proceedingsof the drama, to manipulate its theatricaleffects, contrive its plots, set its stage, and controlits mimeticplay of illusion and reality,Dionysus, the god of the theater, mustalso take on womanishtraits, then perhaps we mayventure yet further: can there be some intrinsicconnections linking the phenomenon of Athenian trag-

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions edy,invented and developed in a historicalcontext as a civicart form,and what the societyculturally defines as femininein its sex/gendersystem?6 There is nothingnew in stressingthe associationsof Dionysus and the feminine for the Greek theater.After all, madness, the irrational,and the emotional aspects of life are associated in the culture more with women than with men. The boundaries of women'sbodies are perceived as more fluid,more permeable, more open to affectand entryfrom the outside, less easily controlledby intel- lectual and rational means. This perceived physicaland culturalinstability ren- ders them weaker than men; it is also all the more a source of disturbingpower over them,as reflectedin the factthat in the divine world it is feminineagents, for the most part, who, in addition to Dionysus, inflictmen with madness- whetherHera, Aphrodite,the Erinyes,or even Athena as in Sophocles' Ajax. On the otherhand, we mightwant to viewthe androgynyof Dionysus,already in Aeschylus called a gunnis(womanish man) and pseudanor(counterfeit man, frag. 61 Nauck, 2nd ed.), as a true mixtureof masculine and feminine.This mixture,it can be argued, is one of the emblems of his paradoxical role as dis- rupter of the normal social categories; in his own person he atteststo the coin- cidentiaoppositorum that challenges the hierarchiesand rules of the public masculine world,reintroducing into it confusions,conflicts, tensions, and ambiguities, insistingalways on the more complex nature of life than masculine aspirations would allow.7Such a view would stressmale and female aspects alike; it would regard the god as embodyinga dynamicprocess or as configuringin his person an alternate mode of reality.Convincing as this view may be, it runs the risk of underratingthe factthat it is preciselyDionysus' identificationwith the feminine that gives him and his theatertheir power. Along the same lines, in the quest for equivalence between the genders, one could remark,not withoutjustice, thatalthough all the actorsare male in tragedy, we find that within the plays feminized males are countered by masculinized women: for example, Aeschylus' Clytemnestraof the "man-counselingmind" (Agamemnon),Euripides' Medea, and, of course, the maenadic Agave herself, who in the Bacchae boasts of her warriorprowess over the body of Pentheus,as yet unrecognized as the son whom she has killed. This notion of a balanced, symmetricalinversion finds support in Greek festivalsoutside Athenswhere men and women change theircostumes for a day,each imitatingthe appearance and behavior of the other.8Better yet, there is evidence that in initiationrites at pubertyor sometimesin nuptial arrangements,young men and women in their own spheres temporarilyadopt the dress and behavior of the other sex.9 Such reversals are usually explained according to a ritual logic that insiststhat each gender mustfor the last time,as it were,act the part of the otherbefore assuming theunequivocal masculine and feminineidentities that cultural ideology requires. 10 As a theoreticalconcept, thisproposition makes eminentsense. On the level of practice,however, these symmetriesare often more apparent than real; the

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions notion conformsbetter with our habits of binary thinkingthan with recorded evidence as these ritesare farbetter and more numerouslyattested for men than for women, not least because theirperformance, aimed at creatingmen for the city,is of greaterconcern to the culture at large. Second, and more to the point,critics treat inversion of roles as a sufficient explanation in itself,that is, a temporaryreversal before its decisive correction. They do not extend their analysis to consider what the various aspects of the actual experience mightimply for achieving male identity.What more specifically mightthese actions and attitudesteach him? How mightthe processes of imitat- ing the feminineprepare him for access to adult status,other than to teach him the behaviorshe mustlater scrupulouslyavoid? Unless therewere somethingto learn and somethingnecessary to repeat,we would not need the genre of tragedy at all to call these differentroles into question and, most of all, to challenge the masculine civic and rational view of the universe. Finally,the pairing of feminized men and masculinized women, a useful notion in many respects,runs the riskof assuming mutuallyinverted categories withoutlooking to the internal dynamicsof tragic conventionsthat shape and predict the conditions of this exchange. Even more, such a concept tends to reduce the scope of the femininein the drama. It is too limited to encompass her double dimensions-a model of both weakness and strength,endowed with traitsand capacities that have negative and positive implicationsfor self and society. Thus my emphasis falls not upon the equal interchangeor reversalof male and female roles but upon the predominance of the femininein the theater,a phenomenon that used to (and may still) puzzle some commentators,who perceived a serious discrepancybetween the mutednessof women in Atheniansocial and political life and their expressive claims to be heard and seen on stage.' And my focus on imbalances rather than on equivalences between the genders is aimed here not so much at the contentand themes of the various dramas in theirpolitical and social dimensionsbut on the implicationsof theaterand theatricalityas these are integrallyrelated to and reflectiveof the thematicpreoc- cupations of drama. If tragedycan be viewed as a species of recurrentmasculine initiations,for adults as well as for the young,'2 and if drama, more broadly,is designed as an education for its male citizens in the democratic city,then the aspects of the play world I wish to bring into sharper reliefmay well meritthe speculations I am about to offer on theater,representation, plot and action, experience and identity-all linked in some radical way withthe feminine. From the outset,it is essentialto understand thatin Greek theater,as in fact in Shakespearean theater,the self that is really at stake is to be identifiedwith the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other.'3 It seems unfair perhaps that,given the numbers and importanceof female protagonists in Greek tragedy(by contrast,it should be said, to the case of Shakespeare),'4

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions theoreticalcritics from Aristotle on never consider anyone but the male hero as the centralfeature of the genre; theydevote theirattention to outlininghis traits, configurations,and dilemmas. Yet despite Clytemnestra,Antigone, Phaedra, Medea, and many others,it mustbe acknowledged that thiscritical blindness is also insight.Even when female charactersstruggle with the conflictsgenerated by the particularitiesof theirsubordinate social position,their demands foriden- tityand self-esteemare neverthelessdesigned primarilyfor exploring the male project of selfhood in the larger world as these impinge upon men's claims to knowledge,power, freedom, and self-sufficiency-notfor some greater entitle- ment or privilege,as some have thought,that the female mightgain for herself, not even for revisingnotions of what femininitymight be or mean. Women as individualsor chorus may give their names as titlesto plays; female characters mayoccupy the centerstage and leave a far more indelibleemotional impression on theirspectators than theirmale counterparts(as Antigone,for example, over Creon). But functionallywomen are never an end in themselves,and nothing changes for them once they have lived out their drama on stage. Rather,they play the roles of catalysts,agents, instruments, blockers, spoilers, destroyers, and sometimeshelpers or saviors for the male characters.When elaboratelyrepre- sented,they may serve as anti-modelsas well as hidden models forthat masculine self,as we willsee, and, concomitantly,their experience of sufferingor theiracts thatlead them to disasterregularly occur before and precipitatethose of men.15 An excellent case in point is Sophocles' Trachiniae,a play that will serve us well throughoutthis essay.Although the distressand despair of Deianeira, the innocent, virtuous wife, commands our attention for most of the play, and although she loses none of our sympathywhen unwittinglydestroying her husband Heracles forlove of him,we come to realize thather entireexperience, her actions and reactions,are in trutha route for achieving another goal, the real telosor end of the drama. She is the agent designated to fulfillthe deceptive, riddlingoracles which predictthe tragicdestiny of Heracles ratherthan a well- earned respitefrom his labors here on earth. She killsherself offstage in remorse, but his are the sufferingswe witnesspublicly on stage, and it is he who, in his firstand last appearance before us, provides the climax and resolution of the drama. Moreover,if we consider more generallythat the tragicuniverse is one that the specificallymale self (actor and/or spectator) must discover for himselfas other than he originallyimagined it to be, then the example of Deianeira is particularlyinstructive for articulatingthe complex position occupied by that feminineother. For in the course of the action, Deianeira indeed does come to that discoveryfor herself,realizing too late that she had been duped. The love charm the centaur had bequeathed to her was in fact a deadly poison, whose fierypotential had been concealed withinthe recesses of the house untilexposed to the warmingheat of the sun. But her education into the treacherousopacity

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of the tragic world holds no interestfor Heracles, preoccupied as he is with unravelingthe riddle of his own story.The ensemble of her lifeand death seems to have nothingto teach Heracles thathe can acknowledge openly on his death- bed, and, even more telling,neither will he allow it to have meaning for their son Hyllus when he prescribesfor the boy'sfuture in termsthat define him only as his father'sson. Medea in Euripides' play comes closest to the demand for an equivalence of thatfeminine self to the male, preferring,as she says,to stand three timesin the van of battle than to bear one child (Medea 250-51). Yet although she has a defined geographical destinationto which she will go once she leaves Corinth in exile, having obtained in advance from its king the promise of sanctuaryin Athens, her spectacular departure from the cityon the dragon chariot of her immortalancestor, the Sun, suggests that there can be no place for her in the social structuredown here on earth. A woman who insistson the bindingnature of the compact she made on her own witha man, who defends her rightto honor and self-esteemin termssuspiciously resembling those of the male heroic code, and finallywho would reversethe culturalflow in foundinga new genre of poetry thatcelebrates now the exploitsof women ratherthan thoseof men (as thechorus sings,410-45) is meant not for human but superhuman status.16Accordingly, it is only logical that she disappear once the drama is over-upward and out of sight.Yet even in thisrevolutionary play the typologystill holds. Medea's formal functionin the plot is to punishJason forbreaking his sacred oath to her,through an exacting retributionof tragicjustice, and she is the typicaland appropriate agent, even if embodied in exotic form,for accomplishingthat crucial end. Let us return now to the central topic-to identifythose featuresthat are most particularto drama, servingto differentiateit fromall other art formsthat precede it: narrative(epic), choral lyricand dance, solo songs, and perhaps even stylizedexchanges of dialogue. Though profoundlyindebted, to be sure, to ritual representationsand reenactments,to ritualcostumes and masks,drama develops along the deeper lines of characterand plot and establishesits own conventions and entitlementsin the more secular sphere.'7 At the risk of drastic (I repeat, drastic) oversimplification,I propose four principal elements as indispensable traitsof the theatricalexperience, all inter- linked in various wayswith one another and to the sum totalof the tragicspec- tacle. And I will assume another more dangerous risk by boldly proposing in advance that each of these traitscan find not its only,to be sure, but its more radical culturalreferent in the traitsand aspects that the societymost associates withthe femininedomain. First, the representationof the body itselfon stage as such-its somatic dimensions and the sense of its physical reality.Second, the arrangement of architecturalspace on stage thatcontinually suggests a relationaltension between inside and outside. Third, the plot itself,that is, the strategiesby which theater

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions best representsa tragicstory on stage and contrivesto bring that storythrough oftensurprising means to the conclusion that the termsof its mythdemand. In this sense, plot as shape of the storyoften coincides in fact,as we will see, with the other connotation of plot as intrigueand deception. And finally,the most extensive category-the condition of theatricalmimetism itself, limited in this discussion to the question of role playingand disguise-or more generally,the representationof a self as other than it seems or knows itselfto be, a self with inner and outer dimensions.

The Body

The emphasis in theatermust inevitably fall upon the body-the performingbody of the actor as it embodies itsrole, figuresits actions, and is shown to us in stylizedposes, gestures,and attitudes.We see thisbody before us in the theatron,the viewingplace, in restand in movement.We observe how it occupies differentareas at differenttimes on stage, how it makes its entrancesand exits, how it is situated at times alone or, more often, in relation with others. This performingbody engages at every moment its sensory faculties-to hear, see, touch, and move; above all, it is the actor as body or body as actor who projects the human voice in all its inflections. Theater has been defined as "the adventure of the human body,"'8 but for Greek tragedy it would be more accurate to call it "the misadventureof the human body."What intereststhe audience most in the somatics of the stage is the body in an unnatural state of pathos(suffering)-when it falls farthestfrom itsideal of strengthand integrity.We noticeit mostwhen it is reduced to a helpless or passive condition-seated, bound, or constrainedin some other way; when it is in the grip of madness or disease, undergoing intermittentand spasmodic pain, alternatingbetween spells of dangerous calm before the stormysymptoms assail the body again. Tragedy insistsmost often on exhibitingthis body, even typicallybringing back corpses killedoffstage so as to expose themto public view. When charactersare stillalive, some demand us to witnessthe spectacle of their sufferingso we may pitythem. Others call for a coveringto hide theirshame or wish to be hidden inside the house-or in some supernaturalway to vanish from the eyes of the beholders. More to the point, it is at those moments when the male findshimself in a conditionof weakness thathe too becomes acutelyaware thathe has a body-and then perceiveshimself, at the limitsof pain, to be most like a woman. Heracles, at the end of Sophocles' Trachiniae,when his fleshis being devoured by the poison of the fatefulrobe, appeals to his son: "Pityme, /for I seem pitiful to many others,crying / and sobbing like a girl,and no one could ever say / that he had seen this man act like thatbefore. /Always without a groan I followeda

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions painfulcourse. /Now in mymisery I am discovereda woman" (Trachiniae1070-75; cf. Euripides Heracles 1353-56). Sophocles' Ajax, in despair afterthe madness that the goddess Athena had sent upon him has abated and determined now to die a manly death that will restore his heroic image to himself,considers the temptationto yield through pityto his wife'sentreaties. If he tempers his will, his tongue that is hard and firmlike a sword, he has blunted its sharp edge; he has in effectfeminized it, as he says (ethdlunthen,for the sake of a woman [Ajax 650-52]). A warriorman oftenlikens himself to a sword; his mind is obdurate, his willand wordsare whettedlike iron (cf.Aeschylus Seven Against Thebes 529 - 30, 715). His is the instrumentof power thatwounds others,while his body remains impenetrableto outside forces.Ajax will harden his will; he will have his heroic death by the sword of iron. But how? By buryingthat sword in the earth and fallingupon it, breaking through the fleshof his side (pleurandiarrexanta, 834). As he violates the boundaries of his body, he also violates tragicconvention by staginghis death as a public act. Yet paradoxically,there is yetanother anomaly in the method he chooses. Suicide is a solutionin tragedynormally reserved only forwomen-and what we are given to witnessis thisconvention borrowed for a man's version of it. A heroic death then in the woman's way,a whettedwill pen- etrated by a whetted weapon, befitting(as we will discuss furtherin another context)the curious ambiguitiesof this most masculine hero.'9 My lastexample here is Hippolytusin Euripides' play.Refusing eros, refusing the touch,even the sightof a woman, he is broughtback on stage in mortalagony afterhis horses had stampeded in frightbefore the apparition of the bull from the sea. Then he cries out that pains dart throughhis head and spasms leap up in his brain, while his desire is now all for a sword to cleave himselfin two and "put his lifeat lastto bed" (Hippolytus1351-52, 1371-77). His symptomsare those of a woman, racked withthe pain of childbirthor the tormentof sexual desire.20 We rememberthen Phaedra's last words,which prophesied thathe would "share in her disease" (Hippolytus730-31)-the deadly pangs of unrequited eros that earlier had reduced her to a sickand sufferingbody. Yet in thatfirst scene, when no one on stage yetknows the cause of her malady,the chorus speaks in generic termsabout the body of a woman. They call it a dustroposharmonia, an ill-tuned harmony; it suffersthe miseryof helplessness (amechania),and is open to the breeze that darts throughthe womb in pregnancyas well as to the tormentsof eros.21 This body is permanentlyat odds withitself, subject to a congenitaldis- sonance between inside and outside. Woman can never forgether body,as she experiences itsinward pain, nor is she permittedto ignore the factof itsoutward appearance in that finelytuned consciousness she acquires withrespect to how she mightseem to the eyes of others. Bodiliness is what most definesher in the culturalsystem that associates her with-physical processes of birthand death and stressesthe material dimensions of her existence,as exemplified,above all, in Hesiod's canonical mythof how the firstwoman, Pandora, was created.22Men

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions have bodies, to be sure, but in the gender systemthe role of representingthe corporeal side of lifein itshelplessness and submissionto constraintsis primarily assigned to women. Thus, it is women who most often tend the bodies of others,washing the surfaceof the body or layingit out forits funeral. Theirs is the taskto supply the clothing that covers the body, and they have a storehouse of robes that may encircle the male victimin its textured folds. When men sufferor die in the theatricalspace, it is the female who most typicallyis the cause. She seems to know,whether consciously or not, how vulnerable,how open-how mortal,in fact-is the human body. These figuresmay be goddesses like Aphrodite and Hera or,above all, the Erinyes,avenging ministers of retributivejustice. But these are also women like Clytemnestra,Deianeira, Hecuba, and, of course, Agave, the motherof Pentheus.23 On the other hand, dressed as a woman, Pentheus makes the firstdiscovery of his corporeal self. Before thishe defends himselfmilitantly against any touch of the other.But now he allows Dionysus to make contactwith his body and, in a grotesque parody of female coquetry,is eager for the god to adjust the fine details of his costume and to arrange the straylocks of hair peeping out from beneath its snood (Bacchae 925-38). With this laying on of hands, Dionysus breaches that physicalintegrity so dear to the male and prepares Pentheus for the terriblesequel, when the voyeur,coming to see as a spectatorwhat he imagines are the women's illicitphysical contacts with others, is himselfexposed to view,his body becoming instead the focus of theirministering hands. Then they indeed touch his body,and in the strengthinduced by theirmaenadic stateeasily tear it apart in the literalact of sparagmos. In this primitiveregression, women undo the body; its structurescannot hold, itslimbs are unbound, and the masculineself, originally so intenton opposing himselfto anythingfeminine, is fragmentedand fliesapart. Female violence may be viewed through the lens of role reversal,but in the Greek imagination the maenadic woman is regularlyendowed with this power,especially over the masculinebody, and is the model herselffor the male who, when he too is seized like Euripides' Heracles in the grip of this madness, can only be described as "playingthe Bacchant" and imitatingthe part of the woman.24

Theatrical Space

Second is the space itselfon stage in the Greek theater,where the human actors situatethemselves and the theatricalaction takes place before the spectator.By convention this space is constructedas an outside in frontof a facade of a building,most often a house or palace, and thereis a door thatleads to an inside thatis hidden fromview. What happens inside mustalways in some way be brought outside-for example, through use of the wheeled platform

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions called the ekkyklema,most oftenused to display the corpses of those bodies who have met their fatal doom withinthe house-visual proof of the violence that must also by conventiontake place offstage.But the verybusiness of entrances and exits, of comings and goings through the door of the house, continually establishesa symbolicdialectic between public and private,seen and unseen, open and secret,even known and unknown.25 In this simple mapping of spatial relations,the stage conventionsnot only chart the bounded areas of social relationsbetween the genders, which assign men to the outside and women to the inside, but theyalso suggestan analogy to the tragicworld itself,which in the course of itsplot and actionsinevitably reveals its hidden and unknown dimensions.26 Earlier I defined the tragicuniverse as one that is other than the self originally imagined it to be. Going one step further,we may add that tragedyis the epistemologicalform par excellence. What it does best throughthe resources of the theateris to chart a path from ignorance to knowledge,deception to revelation,misunderstanding to recognition.The charactersact out and live through the consequences of havingclung to a partial single view of the world and themselves.27 In the process, in the conflictsand tensions that mark the relations between the opposing characters,all come in some way to experience the complexitiesof the world-its multipledimensions, its deceptionsand illusions.Inside and outside organize the dramaticaction of the drama, and theyrefer not only to the shiftingplanes of reality(the known and the unknown) but to the tragic self-both mind and body-and find their material referentin the house and the facade it presentsto the outside world. The house, let us now observe, is the propertyof the male and his family line. The oikosis the visual symbol of paternal hereditythat entitlessons to succeed theirfathers as proprietorof its wealthand movable goods and as ruler over itsinhabitants. As the male in tragedyis oftenconflated with king, the house extends furtheras a locus of masculine power to include the sign of sovereignty over the cityas a whole, and the solidityof itsarchitectural structure symbolically guarantees the enduring stabilityof the social order. Yet the house, as we know, is more primarilythe proper domain of the woman, to which the social rules of the culture assign her, while its men go forthinto the outside world to pursue manlyaccomplishments in war and politics. Thus, in conflictsbetween house and cityor between domesticand political concernsthat are therecurrent preoccupations of tragic plots, the woman, whether wifeor daughter,is shown as best representingthe positivevalues and structures of the house, and she typicallydefends itsinterests in response to some masculine violationof its integrity.As a result,however, of the stand she takes,the woman also representsa subversivethreat to male authorityas an adversaryin a power struggle for control that resonates throughout the entire social and political

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions system,raising the terrifyingspecter of rule by women. Here we mightnote how stronglyalien is the presence of thisfeminine other who, in assertinglegitimate valuesmost associated with her socialrole, is also perceivedas illegitimatelyasserting the rightsreserved for the masculine projectof self. She never achieves these in any permanentway. But in the contestover rightsto controldomestic space that the stage conventionsexploit, it is the woman and not the man who, by reason of her close identificationwith the house as her intimatescene, consistentlyrules the relations between inside and outside and shows herselfas standing on the thresholdbetwixt and between. Men find out in tragedythat they are likelyto enter that interiordomain mostlyto theirperil, whether Agamemnon as he walksupon the crimsoncarpets his wife has spread to lead him to his death at her hands withinthe house, or Hippolytus confrontedinside with the nurse's revelation to him of Phaedra's guiltysecret that is the beginningof his doom, or Polymestorin Euripides' Hecuba whom the Trojan queen lures into the tent to take a woman's revenge on the perfidiousThracian king who has killed her child. As a general principle,the absent hero returnsto his house eithernever to enterthrough its doors again, as for the extremecase of Heracles in the Trachin- iae, or to meet with his own destructionwithin, as in the cases cited above, or finally,like the Heracles in Euripides' play, to go mad once inside the house, slayinghis wife and children and literallyinsuring the fall of the house by top- pling its columns. On the other hand, if the male would successfullypenetrate the interiorof the house and reclaimit forhis own, he typicallyrequires feminine assistance,best exemplified in the factthat, as we willdiscuss further in a different context,all the extantversions of Orestes' storyinsist upon pairing him withhis sister,Electra. Men imagine theycan control that interiorspace by attemptingto control the women withinit, and they object, often violentlyas Pentheus does in the Bacchae,when in the most dramaticreversal they leave the stiflingenvironment of the house to venture forthto the open (although equally uncivic world) of forestand mountains.But the king'sauthority lapses on all fronts.He is unable to bringback his Theban women fromthe mountainsto put themin theirrightful place, -ultimately-goingout to meet themon theirnew terrainwith the resultswe already know.But he failstoo on domesticterritory when he would lock up the other maenads (and theirleader Dionysus) and imprisonthem within the house. Literallybinding them with fetters, he discoversall too soon the futilityof apply- ing coerciveforce as theyeasily-magically-loosen themselvesfrom his restraints, while his larger demands for masteryover the house literallycollapse when Dionysus sends the earthquake to shake the oikosto its veryfoundations. The situationof Pentheus leads to a furtherpoint. The king erectsbarriers around himself (and his psyche) against the invasion of Dionysus even as he

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions strugglesto maintainthe integrityof the house and the walled cityof Thebes.28 If tragedy,as I have suggested,is the epistemologicalgenre par excellence,which continuallycalls into question what we know and how we thinkwe know it, it does so often by confrontingthe assumptions of rational thought with those psychologicalnecessities that may not be denied. The masterexample of Pentheustherefore gives another turn to the dialectic of inside and outside thatfocuses on the woman and the house as containersfor the emotional energies of the self and the society.The house has its many kinds of secrets that men do not know, and the challenge to male authorityover it thereforetakes place on several levels-the social, cognitive,and psychological. If men enter thisdomain, assuming theirlegitimate rights to its custody,only to meet witha welcome theyhad not foreseen,at the same time theyalso inevitably fail to lock up, to repress those powerful forces hidden in the recesses of the house. Quite the contrary-tragic process,for the most part, conveyedthrough the catalyzingperson and actionsof the feminine,puts insistentpressure on the facade of the masculine self in order to bring outside that which resides unac- knowledged and unrecognized within.Here in the Bacchae,where the inversion of roles is expresslyposed in spatial terms that send the women outside and situate the man within,the stage conventionsare used to their best effectas Pentheus leaves the interiorspace now for the last time-for his liberationand for his destruction-dressed, as we mightnow expect, like a woman.

The Plot

Third, the plot itself-that which brings about the recognition,the anagnorisis-the plot whose process Aristotledescribes as a combinationof desis, binding, and lusis,unbinding, denouement, and which in its complex form he calls by the correspondingGreek term,a sumploke,an interweavingas thatwhich describes the fabric,the textureof the play (Poetics1455b). At a higherlevel, these termsare even more suggestiveas theymight remind us how the tragicworld worksits ruinous effectsthrough modes of entrapment and entanglementthat causes its charactersfirst to stumble through ignorance and error and then to fall. In the elaborate tragicgame, the metaphoricpatterns of binding and unbindingcontinually operate in a reciprocal tensionas signs of constraintand necessity,on the one hand, and of dissolutionand death, on the other, defining the parameters between which characters are caught in the "double bind."29 In the cognitivepsychology of tragicman, innerchoice and externalnecessity (or ethos,character, and daimon,divine power) finallyconverge to sanctionwhat- ever form of tragicjustice the plot demands for its satisfyingfulfillment. Thus the "nature of tragicaction appears to be defined by the simultaneouspresence

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of a 'self' and somethinggreater at work thatis divine."30In thissense, the gods finallymay be said to direct the energy of the action and to be understood retrospectivelyas supportingand advancing the outcome of the myth. Gods sometimes appear on stage (and I have already remarked how fre- quentlythese figuresare goddesses), although mostoften they operate fromafar as inhabitingthat other unknown dimension of existencewhich mortals may only grasp dimlyand, of course, too late. But it is remarkablehow often thatenergy is channeled through the feminineother, who serves as their instrumenteven when she acts or seems to act on her own terrainand for her own reasons and even when she acts out of ignorance or of only partial knowledge of the tragic world she inhabits.Thus women frequentlycontrol the plot and the activityof plottingand manipulate the duplicitiesand illusionsof the tragicworld. On the one hand, women's exclusion from the central area of masculine public life seems to be matched by their special access to those powers beyond men's control,to those outside forcesthat make sudden foraysinto human lives, unsettlingall theirtypical assumptions. On the other hand, that same exclusion whichrelegates them to the inside as mistressesof the interiorspace equips them for deviousness and duplicity,gives them a talent,or at least a reputation,for weaving wiles and fabricatingplots, marks of their double consciousness with regard to the world of men. Tragedy is the art form, above all, that makes the most of what is called discrepantawareness-what one characterknows and the other doesn't or what none of the charactersknow but that the audience does. Thus it is that ironyis tragedy'scharacteristic trope, that several levels of meaning operate at the same time. Characters speak withoutknowing what they say,and misreading is the typicaland predictableresponse to the various cues thatothers give. This pervasive ironymay manifestitself in many ways,and it owes its effec- tivenessto a strongconviction about the ambiguous,even opaque natureof verbal communicationthat is reflectedin the belief in oracles. These riddling,divine utterancesinvite interpretationand/or evasion and, at the same time, suggest, when the outcome proves disastrous,how misguided and ignorantthese human attemptsmay be. Apollo and his oracle oftenserve as a primarysource, as Oed- ipus, his mostfamous client,confirms. But otherfactors make fordramatic irony, particularlyin connection with the deceptive powers of the feminineand the special verbal skillsthat accompany these. Clytemnestrain Aeschylus'Agamemnon is the mostpowerful paradigm of the woman who plots,who throughthe riddlingdoubleness of the language to which she resortsbuilds the play to its climax in the murderof her husband withinthe house where she entangles him in the nets of the robe, and only Cassandra, another woman of second sight,perceives but cannot convey what lies behind the guileful persuasion. The case of Phaedra, the virtuous wife in Euripides' Hippolytus,is also instructive.Caught in the conflictbetween desire and honor

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions and determined to preserve her integrityat any cost, Theseus' queen, despite herselfor rather in defense of that apparentlyindefensible feminine self, fab- ricatesthe lyingmessage thatwill implicate Hippolytus as the cause of her death and lead to his literalentanglement in the reins of his own chariot. The patternholds too even at the other end of the dramaticspectrum where in the late romanticplays of Euripides, whichshift to exotic locales, the feminine other takes on a differentconfiguration as the remote object of a mythicquest. Now men are sent forth,albeit unknowing,in search of the absent, forgotten woman who longs to return to the home and loved ones she has lost; in the process of rescuingthe feminine,they find out theyhave redeemed and refound a version of male heroic identity.But still it is the woman who plots and now openly devises a plan on stage before us-this time for the best of reasons-her own rescue and thatof her menfolk,as does Iphigenia in the Iphigeniain Tauris or Helen in the play of the same name. The men here are only adjuncts of the women; theyoffer prior schemes of theirown but inevitablyyield to and coop- erate in the woman'ssuperior plans thatall involveelaborate dramas of deception. If we take a rapid inventoryof the plot as intriguein the extant plays of the tragiccorpus, some interestingprinciples emerge.3' First,it is the women whose plots are more generally successful.32If men succeed, however,it is precisely because theyhave allied themselveswith women-for example, in the Euripidean playsjust cited, and more broadly in the various treatmentsof the Orestes story where Orestes succeeds in avenginghis fatherthrough the murderof his mother because he hasjoined forceswith his sister,Electra. Thus the recognitionbetween them mustnecessarily precede the praxisof vengeance. In the Choephoroiof Aes- chylus (the second play of the Oresteia),for example, it is only after the long interchangebetween himself,Electra, and the female chorus of libationbearers that Orestes is able at last to interpretthe dream of Clytemnestra,and thus, psychologicallyequipped, is ready to assume a stranger'sdisguise that will gain him successfulentry into the femininedomain of the house.33 Second, whereas deceit and intrigueare condemned in woman, theyare also seen as natural to her sphere of operations and the dictatesof her nature.34For the male, however,resort to dolos,trickery, is what most undermines masculine integrityand puts him under the gravestof suspicions.These are best mitigated when the one to be deceived is a cruel, barbarian king of another land (as in the late Euripidean plays) whose adversarystatus comes closer to the role of melo- dramatic villain.35The case of Orestes at home in Argos is even more infor- mativein this regard. His success, it is true, depends on reunion withhis sister, but his resortto trickeryand disguise (dolos,mechane) entails a furtherrisk to his masculine stature,no matterhow urgentand obligatoryis his taskof vengeance. Appeal to the authorityof Apollo the god is thereforeneeded tojustify this mode of action. The god (in both Aeschylus and Sophocles) must explicitlydecree a

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions retributionthat exactlymatches the original crime: as she (Clytemnestra)killed, so mustshe be killed in turn-by guile (AeschylusChoephoroi 556-59; Sophocles Electra32-37). Sophocles' Trachiniae,that schematicmodel of gender relations,again sup- plies an excellentversion of the norm. Heracles too practicesdeception, firstto conquer the girl Iole, the currentobject of his erotic desire and the immediate cause of all his woe, and then to introduceher secretlyinto the house. But in his case, deception returnsquite literally(and most dramatically)against him. His deception, revealed by others to his wife, activatesthe Centaur's ruse, plotted long ago as the deadly poison entrusted as a secret love charm to Deianeira's safekeepinginside the house. The point is that innocentas Deianeira may be of conscious intentto harm her husband, she stilleasily proves a betterand more successfulplotter than he. Masculine guile is repaid in full-even when retalia- tion does not openly bear the name of revenge. If this Heracles conformsso well to the normativepattern, Ajax, that other great hero, does not. His is a curious case, but one whose anomaly mightjust prove the point. At the crucial moment of Sophocles' play,having determined to die an honorable death, he delivers a deceptive speech that suggests he has changed his mind and has learned to bend with the vicissitudesof time and change. With this speech he puts off those who would guard him and leaves himselfalone to stage that elaborate suicide to which I have earlier referred. Criticshave energeticallycontested the status of this speech as truthor lie. For while the outcome of the plot tells us that Ajax has not undergone any funda- mental conversion of spirit,he also seems to have arrived at the kind of tragic knowledge we recognize as intrinsicallytrue to the genre. How then can we read the enigma of this speech? Better still,how can we read Ajax, the traditionalepic hero, who would resort to a deceptive plot that goes against the grain of strictmasculine values in which Ajax puts too much store? This is the man, afterall, we mightnote withrespect to spatial relations, who could not endure, as the oracle riddlinglysuggests for his salvation,to remain insidethe tent even for the space of one single day. But it is preciselythe ambiguities of this hero who in his madness has not acted the part of the hero and preciselythe question of dishonor converted finallyto honor that account for the interestingambiguities of his subsequent actions,which rewrite the theatrical conventionsassociated withgender. Thus the deceptive speech makes sense as a femininestrategy enlisted in the service of restoringan unequivocal manliness that he can only achieve, as I suggested before, by dying the manly death- heroicallyand publiclyon stage-yet in the woman's way. Now when other male characters,those not designated as tragic figuresin the dramaticaction, seek to deceive, theirdevices flounder,and men as these are dismissedout of hand.36 Agamemnon, so easily duped by his wifein Aeschylus'

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions play,miserably fails, for his part, when in Euripides' Iphigeniain Aulis he and Menelaus plot to bring Iphigenia as a sacrificefor the expedition to Troy under the pretextof a marriage withAchilles. Clytemnestrafinds them out-by a for- tuitousaccident-and the sacrificeonly takes place throughIphigenia's voluntary and open choice of the role assigned to her by her fatherand the myth.Most tellingof all perhaps, Odysseus, the masterplotter on his own epic territory(and a familiartrickster figure in the plots of mischievoussatyr plays), only sees his plans go awry on the tragic stage-for example, in Sophocles' Philocteteswhen Neoptolemus, son of Achilles,rejects finally the man and his plans, he of whom his fatherhad said in the Iliad, "I hate like the gates of Hades a man who hides one thingin his heart and speaks another" (9.312-13). The Bacchaefinally, as we mightexpect, furnishes the mostremarkable example of the uses of plottingand exposes the conventionsof its theatricaldeploy- mentas the pivotalpoint around whichthe entireplay revolves and the peripeteia depends. All the operative termscome into play-secrecy, guilefulness,entrapment,and femininity-as Dionysus and Pentheusengage in theirpower struggle forcontrol over the other,the city,the women, and ultimately,over the outcome of the plot itself.Pentheus aligns himself,of course, with physicalforce as the masculine means to victory,trying and failing to bind his adversary (and his followers),and ready to dress as a soldier and deploy an army for a military battle against the women. What Dionysus does is to retaliateagainst threatsof forceat thiscritical moment with a devious plot-to entice Pentheus to go alone to the mountainsin secrecy. What this means is that he persuades Pentheus to trade his ready reliance on physicalcombat for thatother, diametrically opposite mode of action-resort to a cunning plot of self-concealment.In other words, Dionysus' strategyfor victoryover his opponent is firstto lure him into embracing the same kind of strategy.They are co-conspiratorsnow, plotting together but forultimately diver- gent results,as for one the intriguewill succeed in every respect and for the other it will disastrouslyfail. But the firstconquest of Pentheus already lies in the fact that he agrees to shifthis tacticsfrom open forceto the secretdeception of hiding,and the second, which followsupon the first,is the change in dress frommale to female that,as Dionysus argues, is essential for the success of the project. These two steps, however,imply one another-it is the woman who has recourse to devious plotting,the verycharges Pentheus has laid againstboth Dionysus and the maenads (e.g., 475, 487, 805-6), and the costume Pentheus dons thereforematches and visuallyrepresents the femininenature of the strategyhe has already chosen. But in the ways of women Pentheus is only an imposter,easily betrayedby the other superior plotter,and hence the scheme he contrivesand carries out can only recoil against him for his own doom.

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Mimesis

I come now very brieflyto my fourthand most inclusiveelement- that of mimesis itself,the art of imitationthrough which charactersare ren- dered lifelikeand plot and action offeran adequate representationof reality.Yet mimesis also focuses attention on the status of theater as illusion, disguise, double dealing, and pretense. There is a serious and wonderfulparadox here. For while theater resorts continuallyto artifice,as it must, to techniques of make-believethat can only resemble the real, it can also better represent the larger world outside as it more nearly is, subject to the deceptions, the gaps in knowledge, the tangled necessities, and all the tensions and conflictsof a complex existence. Role playingis what actors mustliterally do in the theateras theydon their costumesand masks to impersonatean other-whether king or servant,mortal or god, Greek or barbarian, man or woman. But the reverse side of the coin is to be dubbed an actor, a hypokrites,who is only playing a role, offeringonly a persona(a prosopon)to the other that does not match what lies behind the mask. Recognition,anagnorisis of persons whose identitieswere unknown or mis- taken is, of course, a typicaland even focal device of tragicaction. But this kind of recognitionis the overtlytheatrical event that condenses the epistemological bias of the entire phenomenon of drama. Thus recognitionextends along a far wider spectrum,embracing the world, the other,and the self. The problem of accuratelyreading the other is a continuing,obsessive concern in Greek tragedy that increases in urgencyas the genre displaysa greater self-consciousnesswith regard to its own theatricalresources. But recognitionof the unknown self,as for Oedipus, or of the hidden self, as for Pentheus or even for Deianeira, is perhaps the most elusive but also the most psychologicallysignificant result on the tragicstage, suggesting what the inventionof theaterfor and in the citymight implyabout an emergingimage of the privateindividual and the growingpains of masculine identity.37 This double dimension of role playingis a featurethat Greek societywould perceiveas not exclusivelybut yetfundamentally feminine.38 Woman is the mimetic creaturepar excellence,ever since Hesiod's Zeus created her as an imitationwith the aid of the other artisan gods and adorned her with a deceptive allure.39 Woman is perenniallyunder suspicion as the one who acts a part-that of the virtuouswife-but hides other thoughtsand feelings,dangerous to men, within herselfand the house. "Counterfeitevil" is the charge that Hippolytus is not alone in bringing against the genos,the race of women, for she has the best capacity,by her nature and origin,to sayone thingand hide anotherin her heart, to sow the doubt in her husband's mind, to cite perhaps the radical cause, that the child she bears may be his but again may not be.40

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Woman speaks on the tragicstage, transgressing the social rules if she speaks on her own behalf. In thisrole, her speech and actioninvolve her in the ensemble of tragicexperience and therebyearn her the rightto tragicsuffering. But by virtueof the conflictsgenerated by her social positionand ambiguouslydefined between inside and outside, interiorself and exterior identity,the woman is already more of a "character"than the man, who is far more limitedas an actor to his public social and politicalroles. Woman comes equipped witha "natural" awareness of those verycomplexities men would resist,if theycould. Situated in her more restrictiveand sedentaryposition in the world,she is permitted,she is asked, we mightsay, to reflectmore deeply,like Phaedra, on the paradoxes of herself.Through these she can arrive betterat the paradoxes of the world that she, much betterthan men, seems to know is subject to irreconcilableconflict, subject as well to time,flux, and change (the very themes I mightadd of Ajax's great deceptive speech). Hence the final paradox may be that theater uses the femininefor the purposes of imagininga fuller model for the masculine self, and "playingthe other" opens that self to those oftenbanned emotions of fear and pity. Woman may be thoughtto speak double, and sometimesshe does. But she also sees double; the culture has taught her that too, and it is perhaps not an accident thatonly when Pentheusdresses as a woman does he see double for the firsttime-two suns, two Thebes. This is a symptomof madness, to be sure, attributedby the ancientcommentators to inebriation,but madness is the emblem of the feminine,and seeing double is also the emblem of a double consciousness that a man acquires by dressing like a woman and enteringinto the theatrical illusion. The very factof that dressingup already demonstratesthe premise in unequivocal and theatricalterms. The feminineis a tragicfigure on the stage; she is also the mistressof mimesis, the heart and soul of the theater.The feminineinstructs the other throughher own example-that is, in her own name and under her own experience-but also throughher abilityto teach the otherto impersonateher-whether Pentheus or Dionysus.

This briefdiscussion can suggestonly in outline how closelythe tragicgenre in its theatricalform, representation, and contentis linked to Greek notions of gender, and how for the most part man is undone (or at times redeemed) by feminineforces or himselfundergoes some species of "feminine"experience. On the simplestlevel, this experience involvesa shiftat the crucial moment of the peripeteia fromactive to passive, from masteryover the self and others to surrender.Sometimes there is madness, alwayssuffering and pathos, whichlead in turn to expressionsof lamentationand pityfrom the chorus and/orthe characters. In a more complex view,tragedy, understood as the worshipof Dionysus,

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions expands an awareness of the world and the self throughthe drama of "playing the other" whose mythicand culticaffinities with the god logicallyconnects the god of women to the lord of the theater. If drama, however,tests masculine values only to find that these alone are inadequate to the complexityof the new situation,it also, as Linda Bamber remarks,"does not dismiss them" but rather most often shows that manliness and self-assertionneed no longer compete with pity and even forgiveness.4' Moreover,the male characterswhose sufferingsare the moststringent and reductive of self are also allowed to discover the internal strengthfor transcending them.42In the end, tragedyarrives at closures thatgenerally reassert male, often paternal, structuresof authority,but before that the work of the drama is to open up the masculine view of the universe.It typicallydoes so, as we have seen, through energizing the theatricalresources of the female and concomitantly enervatingthe male as the price of initiatingactor and spectatorinto new and unsettlingmodes of feeling,seeing, and knowing. We can trace the persistenceof this"initiatory" process fromthe workof the firsttragic poet to the third.43History has cunninglyarranged it thatEuripides' last play,the Bacchae, should also referback to the archaic scenario thatunderlies the ritualconditions of the theater.44Yet viewed in its metatheatricalaspects, the Bacchaealso makes claimsto be considered in a diachronicperspective as a belated examplar of the genre that by now has developed a keen awareness of its own propertiesand conventions.As a result,the play is in a positionto exemplifyand reflectback what was alwaysimplicit in the theater,and at the same time,by the veryadmission of that theatricalawareness, to transformits object of reflection and reorientit in new and differentdirections. If my basic hypothesisis valid, then the distinctivefeatures of Euripidean theater (which are more obvious, in fact,in plays other than the Bacchae) may well lend support to what I have been suggestingabout the intimaterelations betweenthe feminineand the theater.Thus I see all the followingtraits of Eurip- idean drama as various and interlockingfunctions of one another,starting with Euripides' greater interestin and skill at subtlyportraying the psychologyof female characters,and continuingto his general emphasis on interiorstates of mind as well as on the privateemotional life of the individual,most often located in the femininesituation. We may add to these his particularfondness for plots of complex intrigue (usually suggested by women) that use dolos,apatp, technp, and mechane,which withtheir resort to disguise and role playingare an explicit sign of an enhanced theatricality.Finally, we may include more generallyEurip- ides' thematic concern with metaphysicalquestions of reality and illusion in the world. The Helen is the mostsplendid example, as it is a drama thatallows itselfthe fullestplay withthe resources of theaterand uses these to directthe most elab-

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions orate inquiry into the complexitiesof being and seeming and the paradoxical crossingsof illusion and reality.45The source of the confusionis the ontological statusof the feminineitself. There are two Helens, the real, chaste versionwho was left in Egypt and never went to Troy,and the more traditionaladulterous wife whom Menelaus thinkshe has recovered at Troy but is really a phantom, an eidolon,impersonating Helen's true self.I alluded earlierto the symbolicimpli- cations we mightinfer from Pentheus dressing as a woman and seeing double for the firsttime. Here in the Helen,where double vision rules the play in every respect,the woman is both a characterwho to her irremediable sorrow learns firsthand about the most fundamentalproblems of the self's identityand, at the same time,serves as an objectivereferent through which the man mustquestion all his previous perceptionsof the world. What is more, the essentialstrategy for insuringthe success of the intrigueshe inventsfor theirrescue requires that he too adopt a disguise and pretend to be another than himself,allowing her to recount the most dangerous fictionthat the real Menelaus has died. The uses of the play,to be sure, have their deadly serious side for all concerned, and the unhappy residue of spoiled lives persistsbehind the successful outcome of the play. But for love of this woman, whetherin her imagined or realpersona, the man willinglyenters into the theatricalgame and showsa capacity now to act a part and enter into a stage illusion. The Helen is a rare play that pushes itsoriginal improbable (and theatrical)premises as faras theycan go, but the uxorious Menelaus is also a novelty,and the erotic element already diverts the play away fromthe more typicaltragic mode to thatof romance. In thisnew kind of play world Euripides invents,the uses to whichhe puts the feminineand the theatermay be seen as the logical resultof the premises of tragedy.On the other hand, by disclosingthose premises too well, he also alters them and sub- verts the genre that was so firmlybound up with the contextof the masculine civicworld. Thus, in thissense, Euripides may be said to have "feminized"tragedy and, likehis Dionysusin theBacchae, to have laid himselfopen to the scorn thataccrues to those men who consort with women. Aristophaniccomedy, which loves to lampoon Euripides and all his newfangled ideas, continuallypresses the scandal of his erotic dramas, especially those that let women speak more boldly (and hence more shamefully)upon the stage untilAristophanes, in his own late play, the Frogs,evaluates on a full-fledgedscale the development of the tragicgenre by stagingan open contestbetween the old poet, Aeschylus,and the new,Eurip- ides (755-1853). At stake is the choice of which poet Dionysus should bring back from the underworldto the cityand theaterof Athens. Which one is more worthyto save the city,which seems to link itsloss of politicalpotency to the absence of a fertile, potent poet in the tragictheater? Broadly stated,the contestdevelops into one between masculine and femininesides, withAeschylus espousing a manly,virile

82 REPRESENTATIONS

This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions art that exhorts its citizensto militaryvalor and Euripides representinga feminine, slender Muse who is weaker and more insubstantial,leaning toward the sensual and the pathetic.Not surprisingly,when these twoare testedin the scales, Aeschylean tragedyoutweighs the Euripidean by its superior mass and weight. Dionysustherefore abandons his originaldesire forEuripides, to whose seductive allure he had earlier succumbed, in favor of resurrectingthe heroic warrior energies of the earlier poet and, by extension,of the past.46Aristophanes not untypicallyassumes that when thingsgo badly for men and masculine interests the cause lies in a decay of moral and aestheticvalues thatslides easily into hints of effeminacyand all that that implies. In any case, the solution of the Frogsin bringingback the archaic spiritof Aeschylusas a solution to the city'sproblems is also a formal,generic one. It is predicated on the controllingconvention of Old Comedy that fulfillsits festive functionof social renewal by consistentlychoosing the idealized past over the distressing,chaotic present, even as it prefersto rejuvenatethe old (father)rather than, as in New Comedy,to promote the young (son). Moreover,the comic poet paintswith a broad, satiricalbrush, and whateverthe justice or truthof the cause he thinkshe is advancing (and his play,of course, is what he imagines will save the city),he has the genericright to misrepresent,and how he does it here affects Aeschyluseven more perhaps than Euripides. Leaving aside the factthat Euripides too has his militaryand patrioticplays, Aristophaneswould have us believe that the essence of the SevenAgainst Thebes, thatdrama "fullof Ares" invoked to support Aeschylus'case, was some conven- tional treatmentof militaryprowess. It was rathera tragedyconcerning the sons of Oedipus and the dangers theyposed to the safetyof the cityby theirresort to armed combat in the style of the old heroic duel, while the function of the avenging Erinys returningto fulfillthe father'scurse conforms precisely, even schematically,to the rules of the femininein the theateras I have earlierout- lined them. Nevertheless,Aristophanes is a witnesswe cannot affordto ignore. He speaks about the theaterfrom within the theater.Skewed as his caricatureof Euripides (and his drama) may be, his strategyof clusteringthe poet's theatrical,psychological, and noetic innovationsaround a particular affinityfor the feminineis valuable testimonyto a popular contemporaryperception of Euripidean theater, even ifit is bought at the price of suppressingthe continuitieswith earlier drama. Along the same lines, we may even be able to swallowAristophanes' parting shot that implies Euripides' loss of the tragicart is due to "sittingat the feet of Socrates" (1491-95), another favoritetarget for comic misrepresentation.Yet howeverjustified Aristophanic comedy may be to single out both Euripides and Socrates as spokesmen for the new intellectualtrends that confuse and unsettle the older,simpler (hence more manly)values of the city,philosophy would never consortwith tragedy, which it comes to see as its implacable rival in layingclaim

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions to teach the truth,impart knowledge, improve its fellow citizens,and without doubt-to save the city. Socrates,as Plato in the next generationhas him argue, makes no distinction whatsoeveramong any of the tragicpoets when he comes to discuss the theatrical arts. Indeed, he founds his critiqueof drama on Homer, whom he characterizes as the firstteacher and guide of tragedy.47That same Aeschyleanplay is invoked again when Socrates' interlocutorin the Republicfirst quotes a famous verse from it in a proper contextonly at the next moment to turn around the meaning of the lines thatfollow it so as to apply it to the unjust man ratherthan to thejust.48 The argumentin Plato between tragedyand philosophyis well known,and it is not my intentionto air all the old questions or to solve the old dilemmas. But I want to suggestthat Plato, standingoutside the drama, can be called in as a last witnessto support my claims about the intrinsiclinks between femininityand theater,viewed now from a wholly negative perspective. Plato's insistenceon banishingtragedy from his ideal state and his consistentdistaste throughout his career for the tragic poets, whom he sometimes associates quite closely with sophists and rhetoricians,are based, to be sure, on a number of complex and disparate factors.But in addition to the explicitlyphilosophical issues, I want to argue that Plato's position on theatercan also be illuminatedby consideringits relationto his notionsof gender and his attitudestoward the feminine.49 Strange as it may seem, Plato's aim is not all that remote from what Aris- tophanes wants in the Frogs. The project is more far-reaching,to be sure, in every respect,and the means are those which will foreverchange the shape of Westernthought. But, like Aristophanes,Plato is concerned withrestoring men and theirmorals in the city,and, like the comic poet, he insistson the relevance of aestheticstyle and form.Briefly put, forthe purposes of thisdiscussion, Plato's larger concerns may also be translatedinto his general desire to remake man in a masculine societyand through philosophical trainingto purifyand enhance the traditionalheroic notion of manliness (andreza)in a new, revised version in which courage, vigilance,and strengthmay be betterutilized for the improve- ment of self and society. Certainly,Plato comes closestto codifyingunder the name of philosophythe dream of the Greek male for a world that is constitutedas his alone, where he might give birth to himselfand aspire finallyto an immortalityhe has always craved. In tragedy,this desire leads to disaster,most often, as we have seen, throughthe resistanceof the gods-and of the women. Philosophy,on the other hand, offersthe promise of success in this endeavor, providingone followsthe blueprintsthat are carefullydesigned to retrainthe masculine self. It maybe objected thatPlato breaks withthe old stereotypesof gender when he insiststhat women may be just like men withthe exception of a natural infe- riorityin physicalstrength, which does not disqualifythem from participating as guardians (and even warriors) in his vision of the ideal cityin the Republic.

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This is a revolutionaryproposal whose significancewe ought not minimize.50 But we should note thatthis reevaluation of women does not reallyupgrade the femininein itsdifferences from the masculine.Quite the contrary-Plato defuses the power and specificityof the femininewhen he would abolish the familyand the domestic sphere in which that influenceoperated. If he includes the partic- ipation of certain women who may prove to possess masculine abilities,it is preciselybecause in the Republiche believes thatthey may be successfullytaught to imitatethe masculine model. Even here, the principleof equalityfalters when Plato would rewardwith special breeding privilegesmen who have distinguished themselvesin battlebut does not suggestgranting the same opportunitiesto their female counterparts.This may or may not be a trivialslip. What is striking, however,is thatelsewhere femininity plays for Plato throughouthis workits usual role of negativefoil to the masculineas it heads the long listof undesirablemodels for men that descends to the servile,the buffoonish,the bestial,and the non- human (Republic3.395d-396b). Plato's attack on tragedy and its traditionalrepertory operates on several fronts:he objects to the deceptivenessof theatricalityas a misleadingand defi- cient imitationof reality,deplores the often unworthyquality of what or who is being imitated,and insistsupon the damaging effectssuch imitationsare liable to produce on the actors and spectatorsin the theater.5' For the firstcase, I would not go so far as to claim thatPlato explicitlyrefers the art of making illusionsto the feminineper se, even if women, like children, are most susceptibleto its charms (e.g., Laws 658d, 817c) and mostlikely, in fact, to tellthose lyingstories about the gods to theiryoung (Republic377c). But Plato's interestnever focuses forlong on women as such but ratheron the inferiortype of man, who deceptivelypasses off appearances for truthand who appeals to the inferiorparts of the self (and the citizenry)that will yield to the emotions and pleasures (not lessons) of make-believe.Thus, although he confirmsthe conventionaldictum that woman is inclined by nature to be secretive(lathraio- teron)and crafty(epiklopoteron) because of her intrinsicweakness (to asthenes)-and concomitantly,her natural potential for virtue is inferior to a man's (Laws 781 a-b)-Plato hardlysees her (or her representation)as a powerfulacting force in the world of men.52 But by a whole seriesof innuendos and juxtapositions,poets (and artists)are enrolled in the ranks of male tricksterfigures who fall furthestfrom the ideal of manlinessand seek only to cajole, seduce, and pander to the tastesof theiraudi- ence. Imitators(artists and musicians)and poets and theirentourage of actors, dancers, and producersjoin the multitudeof callingsthat are signsof the luxury that corrupts the primitivecity, and these directlyprecede those "makersof all sorts of goods, especially those that have to do with women's adornment"; the sequence then continues with those servants like "beauty-shopladies, barbers, cooks, and confectioners"(Republic 373b-c).

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Once assimilated to the larger category of sophists,dramatic art, reduced finallyto prose rhetoricon a par with oratory,shares in the same field of ref- erence that likens theirfalse imitationsof justice to those activitiespracticed by and for women: cookery (especiallyconfectionery), which "puts on the mask of medicineand pretendsto knowwhat foods are bestfor the body" (Gorgias 464c-d), and beauty-culture,"the counterfeit to physicaltraining ... a mischievous,swind- dling,base, serviletrade, which creates an illusionby the use of artificialadjuncts and make-upand depilatoriesand costume"(Gorgias 465b-c). All thesearts traffic in deceptive appearances, and their effecton others is to pander to appetites and pleasurable gratification. The Gorgiasstresses a certainsensual, effeminatepleasure. But the Republic, in which Plato specificallyaddresses the emotional power of the tragic,empha- sizes the experience of pain and suffering,and evaluates its effectson those who act in and attend the tragicspectacles. Here the associationwith the feminineis clear and explicit,reiterated each time Plato returnsto the topic: when heroes are shown to weep and lament theirmisfortunes, they are not only endorsing a false theologyabout the justice of the gods but are weakening themselvesand others by their indulgence in womanish grief (Republic387e-388a, 605d-e). Such a man does not remain steadfastto himself,exercising self-controland rationallypondering the eventsthat have happened to him. Rather he gives way to cowardice, terror,and a host of conflicting,changeful emotions that ill suit the model of a brave and noble manliness thatthe state (and the soul) requires. Worstof all, he enticesthe spectatorsinto the pleasures of vicariouslyidentifying withhis pitiablestate, and ends by settingthem the example theyunfortunately will learn to imitatefor themselves.53 For Plato, who so often strivesto efface or remove all mixture,confusion, and changeability,his theoryof drama is simplebecause, stripped down to essences, his categoriesare also simple.The mobilityof temporaryreversals and dialectical playwith opposites already introducesa cognitivecomplexity that is the sign itself of a dangerous indeterminacy;it undermines the principle of like to like that regulates his thought and is designed, by its literalness,to reinforcea simple stability.At the mostinclusive level is the dictumthat no man can play more than one part, in life or in the theater(e.g., Republic3.394e-395b). The otheris alwaysweaker and inferiorto theself, whose idealizationrequires that,once perfectlyestablished, it cannot change and stillbe itself.As such, that lack of strength(attributable to the lack of masteryby the rational facultyand hence equatable finallyto a lack of wisdom) can be mosteasily codified according to the conventionalterms of the societyunder the name of the feminineother, to include the cognate negative traitsof cowardice, fearfulness,and emotional lability.Hence, in Plato's reductive view of drama and of gender, playing the otheris a species of wrongfulimitation that threatens to infectreality and degrade the aspiring,virile self. It is thereforeforbidden, above all, "for a man, being a

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions man-in training,in fact to become a good/braveman," to imitatea woman in any waywhatsoever: "whether old or young,whether railing against her husband, or boastingof a happiness whichshe imaginescan rivalthe gods, or overwhelmed with grief and misfortune;much less a woman in love, or sick, or in labor" (Republic3.395d-e). Men are neitherpermitted to impersonatea woman nor to show themselvesin a male personaas undergoing the experiences of a woman, preciselythe routes I have proposed as leading to masculine initiationinto the lessons (and benefits)of the tragicworld. Limited as his discussionof theatermay be, Plato, as a spectatorwho failsto come under the spell of tragicmimesis (or who perhaps once did and was cured), nonetheless darkly confirmsthe inextricablerelationship between theater and the feminine.Tragedy cannot control the ambiguitiesof role playing,as most particularlywhen the male actor is called upon to representthe woman who is not under controleither because she is activelyunruly or because she succumbs to the pressures of her body. More generally,tragedy by its very nature and intentioncan make no solid provisionfor controllingthe ambiguitiesof a world view that theateris expresslydesigned to represent.Thus Plato, fromhis point of view,is entitledto deny to "the solemn and marvelouspoiesis of tragedy"the verytask we mightagree it is wellequipped to accomplish,namely that of impart- ing "beneficialif unpleasing truths,"and to claim instead thatit givesits uncritical and vulgar audience what it desires to see and hear (Gorgias502b). Plato goes stillfurther into the matterof gender and drama in the playful contest he stages between theater and philosophy in the Symposium,where the party to celebrate the recent victoryof the tragic poet, Agathon, at the City Dionysia ends with the crowningof Socrates instead of Agathon. In mounting his own rival drama to explore the subject of eros, Plato excludes the presence of the feminineat the banquet but subtlyand significantlyuses the categoriesof effeminacyand femininityto enhance the philosophical position that is meant to include and supersede the appeal of the theater. The Symposiumis one of Plato'smost artful and complexdialogues and deserves, of course, much fullerdiscussion.54 It is establishedearly on thatlove of women is an inferiorsort of eros (181a-d). This is not the crucial point. But we may note in our context the persuasive if unfair value of using Agathon as the rep- resentativeof all tragicart. Agathon speaks last,just before Socrates, and in his floweryspeech on eros, which parodies perhaps the very play that earned him the tragic victory(anthos = flower),he demonstratesthe soft and effeminate nature for which he was known and which Aristophaneswickedly lampoons in his comedies (e.g., Thesmophoriazousae).55Although Aristophanes in the Sympo- siumis made at the end to fall asleep before Agathon, thus establishinghis rank in the hierarchythat leads fromcomedy to tragedyand then to philosophy,the comic poet is represented as a far more robust character than the tragic poet, and his contributionto the theme of eros is more memorableand more substan-

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions tial.56The contrast,to be sure, is even more strikingbetween the lovelorn Aga- thon and Socrates,whose physicalendurance and resistanceto pederastictemp- tationattest to the remarkableself-control of thissoldier/philosopher/lover/hero. On the other side, however,philosophy appropriates forits own use the one kind of feminine authoritythat the culture acknowledges as legitimatewhen Socrates names the prophetic priestess,Diotima, as the source of his initiation long ago into the sacred mysteriesof Eros and as the original author of the inspiringdiscourse on eros he now is about to deliver.The feminineretains here her more instinctivealliance withthe eroticas well as her mysteriousconnection with that other world and its secrets whose power we have come to recognize when manifestedin the theater.And the woman, armed withthe prestigeof her sacred vocation,is called upon to instructmen as to how they mighttranscend feminineinfluence and, through the sublimationsof pederastic love, even give birthto themselves. In Plato's counter-dramathe female as benevolent priestesshas no cause of her own to protectand no conflictualinterests to distracther. She is then free to lend whole-heartedsupport to the cause of men and to transmitto thema wisdom withouttragic pain that may become entirelytheirs. She imparts a mythabout the genealogy of Eros that makes the erotic principlea male child and explains his nature by assigning potency and presence to his father,Poros (Ways and Means), and a famishedemptiness to his mother,Penia (Poverty),who deceitfully (and characteristically)tricks the one who is endowed to consort with the one who is not. In suborning theateras well as the feminine,Plato's drama puts the former to sleep in the presence of the wakefulphilosopher and transfersfeminine orac- ular power to Socrates-the midwife-who also incorporatesthe Dionysiac into his satyr-likeimage of Silenus. In the process Plato obviates the tragicnecessity that requires the femininepresence upon the stage and whose complicated and essential functionsin the theaterof Dionysus we have followedthroughout the course of thisessay.

Notes

An earlier,reduced version of this paper was presented at a conference,"After The SecondSex," held at the Universityof Pennsylvania,and at a symposiumhonoring ProfessorHelen Bacon at Barnard College in New York,both in April 1984. I wish to thank the commentatorson these two occasions, Carolyn Heilbrun and Marylin Arthur,respectively, as well as otherswho participatedin the discussion.Thanks also to the members of the Women's Studies Colloquium at Princeton University,who offeredacute and thoughtfulcomments at the presentationof this paper, in partic-

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ular, Natalie Davis, Suzanne Keller, and Elaine Showalter.Finally, I am gratefulto JackWinkler, Simon Goldhill,and Jean-PierreVernant, who read the manuscriptand fromwhose incisiveand valuable criticismI have greatlyprofited. 1. E.g., Bacchae 451-59; Dionysus is called thelymorphos,351 (cf. Pentheus' description as gynaikomorphos[his costume as imitatinga woman's,gynaikomimoi; 981]). 2. For the fullestaccount of thishypothesis, see Richard Seaford, "DionysiacDrama and Dionysiac Mysteries,"Classical Quarterly 31 (1981): 252-75. 3. For the metatheatricalaspects of this scene in particular (and the play as a whole), see Helene Foley,"The Masque of Dionysus,"Transactions of theAmerican Philological Association110 (1981): 107-33; and Charles Segal, DionysiacPoeticsand Euripides'Bac- chae (Princeton,1982), 215-71. 4. See furtherE I. Zeitlin,"Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes' Thesmo- phoriazousae,"in Reflectionsof Womenin Antiquityed. Helene P. Foley (New York and London, 1981), 169-217 (a shorterversion appears in CriticalInquiry8 [1981]: 301-28, and is collected in Writingand Difference,ed. E. Abel [Chicago, 1982], 131-58). 5. It should be noted that, unlike other public Dionysiac festivalsin Attica (and elsewhere) where both men and women participate,the City Dionysia seems to belong to men only (with the sole exception of a girl assigned to carry the ritual basket in the preliminaryprocession). 6. The question I raise here about the developmentof drama in Athens and its political and social motivationsis obviouslytoo complex for this limiteddiscussion. I would suggestmerely that the historicalconditions of drama, interestinglyenough, coincide with a period that sharply polarizes definitionsand distinctionsof masculine and feminineroles. Drama, like the woman, we mightsay, is useful for its society,and at the same time potentiallysubversive and destructive.It is also worthremarking that as theaterreaches its fullflowering in the fifthcentury, the iconographyof Dionysus undergoes a shiftin the vase paintingsfrom a masculine,bearded figureto one, more youthful,who displayseffeminate and more androgynous features. 7. For the bisexual consciousness of Dionysus, see especiallyJames Hillman, The Myth of Analysis(Evanston, Ill., 1972), 258-66. For the more general paradoxes of Dio- nysus' role, see the synthesisof Segal, DionysiacPoetics, 10-19. 8. These festivalsare occasions forriotous carnival (e.g., the Cretan Ekdysia,the Argive Hybristika).Dionysiac merrimentalso lends itselfto such behavior,at least as Philos- tratus,a late source, describes a painting of a Dionysiac revel: "Dionysus is accom- panied by a numerous train in which girls mingle with men, for the revel (komos) allows women to act the part of men, and men to put on women'sclothing and play the woman" (Imagines1.2). 9. On the various forms of transvestismin Greek rite and myth,see Marie Delcourt, Hermaphrodite:Myths and Ritesof the Bisexual Figure in ClassicalAntiquity, trans. J. Nichol- son (London, 1956), 1-16; Clara Gallini, "II travestismorituale di Penteo,"Studi e materialiper la storiadelle religioni 34 (1968): 211-18, esp. 215, n. 6; and WalterBurkert, Structureand Historyin GreekMythology and Ritual (Berkeley,1979), 29-30. 10. "For both sexes the initiationthrough which a young man or woman is confirmedin his or her specificnature may entail, through a ritualexchange of clothing,temporary participationin the nature of the opposite sex whose complement he or she will become by being separated from it" (Jean-Pierre Vernant,"City-State Warfare," in Mythand Societyin AncientGreece, trans. J. Lloyd [Sussex, 1980], 24). Cf. also Henri Jeanmaire,Couroi et Couretes(Lille, 1939), 153, 321. See furtherPierre Vidal-Naquet, "The Black Hunter and the Origin of the AthenianEphebeia" and "Recipes forGreek

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Adolescence," in R. L. Gordon, ed., Myth,Religion, and Society(Cambridge, 1981), 147-85. I borrow his term,"law of symmetricalinversion." 11. The best recent discussion of the question is Helene P. Foley,"The Conception of Women in Athenian Drama," in Reflectionsof Womenin Antiquity,127-68, who offers a judicious and nuanced analysis that, however,leans too far perhaps in seeking a matched symmetryand reciprocitybetween masculine and feminineroles. 12. On tragedyas initiation,related both to the mysteriesand to pubertyrites, see the discussion of Seaford, "Dionysiac Drama" (drawingupon the early pioneering work of George Thomson, Aeschylusand Athens,2nd ed. [London, 1946]). For aspects of pubertyritual reflectedimaginatively in the various dramas see, for Aeschylus'Ores- teia, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Hunting and Sacrifice in Aeschylus' Oresteia,"in Jean- Pierre Vernantand Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Tragedyand Mythin AncientGreece, trans. J. Lloyd (Sussex, 1981), 150, and F I. Zeitlin,"The Dynamics of Misogyny:Myth and Mythmakingin the Oresteia,"Arethusa 11 (1978): 149- 84 (now in Womenand theAncient World:The ArethusaPapers, ed. John Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan [Albany,1984]); for Sophocles' Philoctetes,Pierre Vidal-Naquet, "Sophocles' Philoctetesand the Ephebeia," in Tragedyand Myth,175-99; for Euripides' Hippolytus,see especiallyCharles Segal, "Pentheus and Hippolytuson the Couch and on the Grid: Psychoanalyticand Struc- turalistReadings of Greek Tragedy,"Classical World 72 (1978-79): 129-48, and F I. Zeitlin,"The Power of Aphrodite: Eros and the Boundaries of the Self in Euripides' Hippolytus,"in Directionsin EuripideanCriticism, ed. PeterBurian (Durham, N.C., 1985), 52-111, 187-206; and for the Bacchae, in addition to Seaford, see Segal, Dionysiac Poetics,chap. 6, "Arms and the Man: Sex Roles and Rites of Passage," 158-214. Also relevantto these speculationsis Louis Montrose,"The Purpose of Playing:Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology,"Helios [n.s.] 7.2 (1980): 51-74, who discusses the public functionsof Shakespearean theateras a secularized means of confrontingthe transitionsof life that had earlier been framedin the milieu of Catholic ritual. 13. I am indebtedhere to the stimulatingdiscussion of Linda Bamber,Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Studyof Genderand Genrein Shakespeare(Stanford, 1982), as much for its provocativearguments as for its use in confrontingsome fundamentaldifferences betweenthe femininein Greek and Elizabethan tragedy.There are other "others,"to be sure, on the Athenian stage (e.g., barbarians, servants,enemy antagonists,and even gods), but the dialecticof selfand otheris consistentlyand insistentlypredicated on the distinctionsbetween masculine and feminine,far more even than in Shake- speare. Even the playswith more strictlymilitary and politicalthemes (excepting only Sophocles' Philoctetes)arrange theirplots around criticalconfrontations between masculine and feminine. 14. No Shakespearean tragedyhas a woman as its main character,although sometimes she sharesdouble billing-Juliet,Cleopatra. By contrast,in extantGreek drama women oftenlend theirindividual names or collectivefunctions to the titles(Antigone, Elec- tra,Medea; Choephoroi, Trachiniae,Bacchae, etc.). Moreover,women play far more extensiveroles in Greek tragedy,which increase in subtletyand varietyas the genre develops. 15. The functionalargument is even more obviouslytrue in the case of those playswhich I will not discuss in this essay,in which the plot revolves around the demand made upon an armyfor a virginsacrifice (such as Iphigenia and Polyxena)and where female heroic nobilityin dyingis used mostoften to offeran ironiccounterpoint to masculine Realpolitik.

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 16. See especiallyB. M. W Knox, "TheMedea of Euripides:' YaleClassical Studies 25 (1977): 198-225, for the discussion of Medea's "imitation"of male heroic traits. 17. It should be stressedthat I equate drama here withserious drama ratherthan with comic typessuch as satyrplay and comedy itself,whose primitiveelements may well have preceded the growthof the strangemutant that is tragedy.For even ifwe renounce any hopes of reconstructinga plausible storyof origins,there seems no doubt that the tragic play is the firstto achieve the status of art and that the other formsonly followsubsequently in its wake and under its influence.To speak of theaterthen is to speak firstof tragedy. 18. Y. Belaval, "Ouverture sur le spectacle,"in Histoiredes spectacles, ed. R. Queneau (Paris, 1965), 3-16, esp. 8. 19. I have profitedfrom the discussionin the unpublished paper of Nicole Loraux, "Ways of KillingWomen in Greek Tragedy,"who viewsAjax' suicide as an unequivocal warrior'sdeath. It is true, of course, thatthe sword is a man's weapon and thatif women resortto it,it is theywho are violatingthe rules of gender.Yet it is also true thatAjax' death, by whatevermeans and in whatevermood, is stilla suicide, an act the culture regardsin itselfas inherentlyshameful and thereforeimagined farmore as a feminine solution. 20. On the general question of the female body as the model of male suffering,see the superb studyof Nicole Loraux, "Le Lit, la guerre,"L'Homme 21 (1981): 36-67. For these symptomsin theHippolytus, see respectivelyLoraux, "Le Lit"'58-59, and Charles Segal, "The Tragedy of the Hippolytus:The Waters of Ocean and the Untouched Meadow,"Harvard Studiesin ClassicalPhilology 70 (1965): 117-69, esp. 122. 21. See the discussionof thisremarkable passage and itskey function in the playin Zeitlin, "The Power of Aphrodite:' 68-74. 22. On Pandora in the Hesiodic text,see especiallythe fineanalyses byJean-Pierre Ver- nant, "The Mythof Prometheusin Hesiod," in Mythand Society,168-85; and Nicole Loraux, "Sur la race des femmeset quelques-unes de ses tribus,"Arethusa 11 (1978): 43-88 (collected in her Les Enfantsd'Athena: Idves atheniennessur la citoyennet6et la divisiondes sexes[Paris, 1981], 75 -117). 23. It is worth noting too that the details of the sacrificeof the virgin'sbody holds par- ticularfascination for the messengerspeeches of the relevanttragedies. 24. See furtherRuth Padel, "Women: Model forPossession by Greek Daemons," in Images of Womenin Antiquity,ed. AverilCameron and Amelie Kuhrt (London, 1983), 3-19. It is remarkablethat in Euripides' Heracles,where the great Heracles goes mad and kills his wife and children,the chorus in response compares him only withwomen: the Danaids (who slew theirhusbands on theirwedding night)and Procne (who slew her child in revenge for her husband's rape and mutilationof her sister,Philomela; Heracles1016-27). 25. On the uses of these stage conventionsand theirrelations of the inside/outside,see especially A. M. Dale, "Seen and Unseen on the Greek Stage:" in CollectedPapers (Cambridge, 1969), 119-29; the discussion of Padel, "Women"; and Zeitlin, "The Power of Aphrodite:' 74-79. 26. The locusclassicus is Xenophon's Qeconomicus.The best discussion is Jean-PierreVer- nant, "Hestia-Hermes: Sur l'expressionreligieuse de l'espace et du mouvementchez les Grecs,"in Mytheet pensee chez les Grecs(Paris, 1965), 6-27. 27. See, for example, the incisiveremarks of Jean-PierreVernant, "Tensions and Ambi- guitiesin Greek Tragedy,"in Vernantand Vidal-Naquet,Myth and Tragedy,6-27. This

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions epistemologicalemphasis thereforeboth exploits and is conditioned by the special capacityof theaterto representand embody the interactionbetween other points of view,attitudes, gestures, and language. 28. On the symbolicvalue of the house, see J. Wohlberg,"The Palace-Hero Equation in Euripides,"Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 16 (1968): 149 - 55; and the much fullerdiscussion in Segal, DionysiacPoetics, 86-94 and passim. 29. For fullerdiscussion of these termsand theirrelation to the structuresand structuring capacities of plots,see Zeitlin,"The Power of Aphrodite:"58-64. 30. Jean-PierreVernant, "Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy,"in Mythand Society, 51. His is the most nuanced discussion of this double determinationthat is often misnamed as a conflictbetween fate and free will. 31. For discussions of intrigueplots in general, see especially Friedrich Solmsen, "Zur Gestaltung des Intriguenmotivsin den Tragodien des Sophokles und Euripides,' Philologus84 (1932): 1-17; and Hans Strohm,"Trug und Tauschung in der euripi- deischen Dramatik,"Wiirzburger Jahrbucher fur die Altertum-swissenschaft4 (1949/50): 140-56, collected in Euripides,ed. E. Schwinge,Wege der Forschung,no. 89 (Darm- stadt, 1968) as 326-44 and 345-72, respectively.See now also the wider-ranging discussionof Frances Muecke, "'I Know You-By Your Rags': Costume and Disguise in Fifth-CenturyDrama," Antichthon16 (1982): 17-34. 32. The Ion of Euripides, a play in many ways a precursor of New Comedy, foils the woman's plot against her unrecognized son (not withoutsome fancyhelp from the gods) so as to bringabout thejoyful reunion. The play,I mightadd, is careful not to credit the woman Creusa as the one who firstinitiates the intrigue. 33. Euripides' Electrais stillmore complex,as the play separates the two acts of vengeance against Clytemnestraand her lover, Aegisthus. The old servant suggests the plot against Aegisthus(to take place outside far away fromthe house), while Electra con- trivesthe elaborate and doubly deceitfulintrigue against Clytemnestra. 34. This is a commonplace in tragic texts (as elsewhere): e.g., Iphigeniain Tauris 1032; Medea 834-35; Andromache85; Hippolytus480-81; Ion 483. 35. Even in these plays,masculine honor is protected,as itwere, in thateach man (Orestes, Menelaus) firstproposes force before he accedes to the woman's practical,clever schemes (Iphigenia, Helen), and each, just before the end, is permitteda display of manlystrength against the forcesof the barbarian king in question. 36. The one exception thatcomes to mind is Euripides' strangeplay, Andromache, where Orestes,not a major character,successfully plots to have Neoptolemus killedat Delphi so as to reclaim the latter'swife, Hermione, for his own. 37. "The covert theme of all drama:' Michael Goldman suggests,"is identificaton,the establishmentof a selfthat in some way transcendsthe confusionsof self"; TheActors Freedom:Toward a Theoryof Drama (New York, 1975), 123. In general, I have learned much fromthis stimulatingstudy of the workingsof theater. 38. Odysseus is the exemplar in the masculine sphere, but he neithergenerically repre- sents "the race of men" nor, let me repeat, is this adaptable survivor(with strong affinities,in fact,to the feminine)a candidate for tragedyin the dramaticmilieu. 39. Earlier I alluded to the creationof Pandora as exemplifyingthe physical,"creaturely" side of life. I emphasize now the other aspect of woman's creation as an object cun- ninglywrought; she is a deceptive giftin returnfor Prometheus'deception of Zeus, herselfendowed witha craftyintelligence. Woman thereforeembodies both extremes of nature and culture that togetherconspire to waste a man's substanceand dry him up before his time.

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 40. For a similar idea, see Ann Bergren, "Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought,"Arethusa 16 (1983): 74, 77. 41. This is a combined quote and paraphrase (withone small alteration)of Bamber,Comic Women,Tragic Men, 15. 42. In this respect, there are strongcontinuities with the earlier epic tradition.See the interestingconclusions of Helene Monsacre'sfine, nuanced study,Les Larmesd'Achille: Le Heros,la femmeet la souffrancedans la poesied'Homkre (Paris, 1984), 199-204. 43. We mightnote thatinitiation into the "real" Eleusinian mysteriesinvolved some forms of imitatingthe specificallyfeminine experiences of Demeter and Kore. 44. More accurately,it is one of the very last, produced posthumouslyin Athens as was the Iphigeniain Aulis. 45. For the interplayof illusion and reality,see FriedrichSolmsen, "Onomaand Pragma in Euripides' Helen,"Classical Review 48 (1934): 119-21; Ann Pippin (Burnett),"Eurip- ides' Helen: A Comedy of Ideas," ClassicalPhilology 55 (1960): 151-63; Charles Segal, "The Two Worldsof Euripides' Helen," Transactionsof theAmerican Philological Associ- ation 102 (1971): 553-614; and see now George Walsh, The Varietiesof Enchantment: EarlyGreek Views on theNature and Functionof Poetry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 96 -106. On the connectionswith theaterand femininityin the contextof comic parody,see Zeitlin,"Gender and Genre," 186 - 89. 46. I simplifyhere the terms of the debate. Both sides are thoroughlysatirized in this brilliantparody. For an excellentdiscussion, see Walsh,Varieties of Enchantment, 80 - 97. 47. See especallyRepublic 595c, 598d, 605c-d, 607a, 602b. 48. Republic2.366a-b; cf. 361b-c. Strictlyspeaking, the Aeschylean quotes precede the discussion of the mimeticarts in book 3, but theirmisuse may not be fortuitous. 49. I include in the discussion the relevantportions of Republic,Gorgias, and Laws, to be followedby the Symposium. 50. This issue deserves far more attentionthan space permitshere. 51. Tragedy is the real target,despite the remarks about epic poetry and comedy. See especiallyLaws 8 16d-e, 935d- 936b forcomedy, and 81 7a-d fortragedy, where Plato expresslysets up the legislatorsas authors of their own true tragedies as "rivals ... artistsand actors of the fairestdrama." 52. One single exception is the woman (wife and mother) as instigatingin her son the slide toward timocraticbehavior by her nagging and greed (Republic549c-e). We will take up the functionin the Symposiumof the priestess,Diotima, in the appropriate context. 53. The ostensible motive for banning poets in book 3 is the education of the young guardians to protectthe city.Courage in battleis the model forcontrol over warring forceswithin the self,as is emphasized in the second discussion of imitationin book 10. Cowardice is the radicallyfeminine trait, despite Plato'swillingness to trainselected women as guardians. (The locusclassicus is Timaeus90e-91a, in whichPlato describes the firstcreation of women as due to "creaturesgenerated as men who proved themselves cowardlyand spent their lives in wrongdoingand were transformedat their second incarnationinto women.") I simplifyPlato's intricateargument, as he further sees this lack of control over the emotions,engendered by tragedy,as leading to an unrulinessand violence he does not specifyas feminine.Yet the tyrannicalman, the most "theatrical"in Plato's view,whose exterior pomp and costume does not at all match his inner self (Republic577b), is seen ultimatelyas a slave to his passions who becomes so fearfulthat he "livesfor the mostpart coweringin the house likea woman" (Republic579b-c).

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This content downloaded from 140.233.185.52 on Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 54. In particular,the discussionwould benefitfrom including the importantcontribution made by Alcibiades, the disruptivelatecomer and partycrasher, but it would not in any case substantiallyalter my argument. 55. In thiscomedy, which satirizesEuripidean tragedythrough the women'sindignation at the poet forhis unflattering(and oversexed) portraitsof them,Agathon comes off as the trulyeffeminate male by contrastto the tricksterbut more manly figureof Euripides. Agathon appears in feminineaccessories, claiming that to write female parts for the theaterone mustdress as a woman. He refusesto infiltratethe women's festivalon the groundsthat he would provideunfair competition for the "real"women, and finallysupplies the femininecostume for Euripides' kinsman, who has been persuaded to go instead. 56. Aristophanespresents the famousmyth of the sphericalhuman beingswho, separated by Zeus fortheir hybris toward the gods, are foreversearching for reunion withtheir other halves. These may be of the same or opposite sex, depending on the original compositionof each.

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