The Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy Dué, Casey
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The Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy Dué, Casey Published by University of Texas Press Dué, Casey. The Captive Woman's Lament in Greek Tragedy. University of Texas Press, 2006. Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/3081. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/3081 Access provided at 16 Oct 2019 21:06 GMT from University of Washington @ Seattle chapter one men’s songs and women’s songs Are the voices of women in men’s poetry representative of women’s inde- pendent song traditions? What role, if any, did women’s song traditions play in the shaping of men’s epic traditions (and, later, tragedy)? In recent years scholars have begun to suggest that women’s lament traditions may have played a crucial role in the development of epic and tragedy, which were traditionally performed by men.1 Sheila Murnaghan has noted, for example, that the majority of women’s speech in the Iliad and the Odyssey is closely related to lament in both language and theme.2 Epic poetry narrates the glory of heroes, the klea andrôn, but it also laments their untimely deaths and the suffering they cause by means of the mournful songs performed by the women left behind. Turning to the Classical period, we fi nd that Greek tragedy is similarly infused with feminine voices and indeed femininity, as the work of such scholars as Helene Foley, Nicole Loraux, and Froma Zeitlin has shown over the course of the past two decades.3 While a defi nitive and comprehensive answer to the vexed question of the prominent roles women play in drama and their relationship to “real life” is yet to be found (and may never be), it seems clear at least that Greek drama employed the feminine to confront 1. Murnaghan 1999, Nagy 1999, and Sultan 1999. In the arguments that follow, I am heavily indebted to the work of these three scholars. 2. Murnaghan 1999, 206. See also Monsacré 1984, 137–96 and Dué 2002. Richard Martin (1989) has studied the many genres of stylized speech that have been incorporated into the genre of epic poetry, and he has shown that the Iliad and the Odyssey include within the overall epic frame the conventions and allusive power of a number of other preexisting verbal art forms, including prayer, supplication, boasting, and insulting, as well as lament (on lament, see especially Martin 1989, 86–88). 3. See especially Foley 2001, Loraux 1995 and 1998, and Zeitlin 1996, with references to earlier work therein. For the feminine aspects of the heroes of Greek epic, see Monsacré 1984. DDue.indbue.indb 3300 110/6/050/6/05 112:25:112:25:11 PPMM men’s songs and women’s songs 31 questions of masculinity. In the words of Zeitlin, “the fi nal paradox may be that theater uses the feminine for the purposes of imagining a fuller model for the masculine self, and ‘playing the other’ opens that self to those often banned emotions of fear and pity.”4 Most recently in The Mourning Voice, Nicole Loraux examines the function of lamentation in Greek tragedy in order to explore the personal involvement of the audience in the emotional force of tragedy. Arguing against overly political interpretations of the function of tragedy, Loraux emphasizes the outlet that tragedy provides for grief in a city-state where lamentation and elaborate funerals for individuals had become restricted by law.5 During the Peloponnesian War, women’s rituals of mourning were supplanted by the grandeur of a state funeral for the citizens who gave their lives for the city, but in tragedy, women’s wailing takes center stage.6 In this chapter I propose to give an overview of the place of the cap- tive woman’s lament in epic and tragedy within the history of Greek song traditions in general. I argue that the captive woman’s lament in Greek tragedy draws on a number of song traditions, and in doing so becomes a song tradition in its own right. To what extent the stylized laments of the captive women on the Greek stage echo the laments of actual slave women and prisoners of war residing in Athens is itself an extremely interesting but probably unanswerable question.7 Instead, in this book I seek to trace the development of the captive woman’s lament as a powerful theme within the poetic conventions of Greek tragedy, while also paying special atten- tion to the instances where these conventions and their emotional dynamic can be shown to intersect with the documented songs and experiences of actual women. 4. Zeitlin 1996, 363. Loraux agrees with this formulation (Loraux 1995, 9). 5. Loraux 2002. On the legislation of lament in the Archaic period see, e.g., Alexiou 1974, 14–23; Loraux 1986, 45–49; Holst-Warhaft 1992, 114–19; McClure 1999, 45; Murnaghan 1999, 204–5; and further below. 6. On the displacement of women’s laments by the state funeral oration see especially Loraux 1986 and further below. 7. For a recent look at women and slavery in antiquity, see the collection edited by Joshel and Murnaghan (1998), which necessarily relies on male-authored and primarily literary sources (see pp. 19–20 of the introduction to that volume). On the institution of slavery in ancient Greece in general, see Finley 1960, 1980, 1981, and 1987; Sainte Croix 1981; Wiedemann 1981 and 1987; Vidal-Naquet 1986, 159–223; Garlan 1988; and Fisher 1993. For transcripts of modern Greek laments recorded by anthropologists, see Lardas 1992 (which contains translations of modern Greek laments) and the collections cited in the bibliography of Roilos and Yatromanolakis 2002, 270. DDue.indbue.indb 3311 110/6/050/6/05 112:25:112:25:11 PPMM 32 the captive woman’s lament gender, genre, and the development of epic As I noted in the introduction to this book, the seminal work of Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in the Greek Tradition, was the fi rst to explore the continuity of the Greek lament tradition from ancient times to the present day.8 Alexiou studied the surviving laments of epic and tragedy, and traced their metaphors, themes, and diction in the laments of late antiquity, Byzantine literature, and modern Greek funerals. Since the publication of Alexiou’s work, many scholars have undertaken the study of lament, but Ritual Lament remains a basic guidebook to this incredibly rich and endur- ing tradition of women’s song.9 What Alexiou and other scholars of the Greek tradition have found is that Greek women’s laments have maintained a continuous tradition of song-making that is both independent of and parallel to the stylized ver- sions that have been preserved in epic, drama, and later Greek literature. Moreover, there is a great deal of comparative evidence from other cultures to show that the Greek tradition is by no means an isolated phenomenon, and that women all over the world have been singers of lament since ancient times and continue to be so today.10 It is very likely then, if not provable, that the laments of Greek epic, although performed by a male aoidos, would nevertheless have evoked for ancient audiences the songs their mothers and grandmothers performed at funerals upon the death of family members and extended relatives. In this way epic subsumes a distinctly feminine mode of singing within its own mode of expression, the dactylic hexameter, no doubt transforming it, but also maintaining many of its essential features. A ground-breaking book by Aida Vidan can shed light on the dynamics of the process by which women’s song-making becomes incorporated into heroic narratives. Vidan’s book, Embroidered with Gold, Strung with Pearls: The Traditional Ballads of Bosnian Women, publishes and analyzes for the fi rst time women’s songs of the South Slavic tradition that were collected by Milman Parry and Albert Lord and which are now housed in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. With few exceptions, to date only the 8. For continuation and application of Alexiou’s work, see Caraveli-Chavez 1978 and Caraveli 1986, Danforth 1982, Seremetakis 1990 and 1991, Holst-Warhaft 1992, Herzfeld 1993, Sultan 1993 and 1999, Murnaghan 1999, Derderian 2001, and Dué 2002. 9. See also Alexiou 2001. 10. See Bowers 1993 for a brief survey, as well as Rosenblatt, Walsh, and Jackson 1976; Holst-Warhaft 1992, 20–27; and the bibliography in Roilos and Yatromanolakis 2002, under the heading “Ethnographic and Comparative Material.” DDue.indbue.indb 3322 110/6/050/6/05 112:25:122:25:12 PPMM men’s songs and women’s songs 33 men’s heroic songs collected by Parry and Lord have been published and discussed.11 It was the study of the South Slavic epic tradition that prompted Parry and Lord to formulate their thesis that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed within a fl ourishing culture of oral epic song by means of centuries-old traditional techniques for composition-in-performance; this thesis revolutionized the fi eld of Homeric studies.12 Vidan’s book continues the work of Parry and Lord by introducing and publishing several of the women’s songs collected in the very same areas in the former Yugoslavia in which Parry and Lord had collected the heroic songs that they compared to Homeric poetry. Vidan shows that the women’s songs share traditional language and many themes with the men’s heroic songs, but differ from them in important ways. The women’s songs, as one might expect, offer a uniquely female point of view on the action, and are performed in vastly different contexts, such as weddings or intimate gatherings of female friends and relatives.