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Open Thesis1.Pdf THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS AND ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN STUDIES SISTERS AND GREEK TRAGEDY ANNA PAPILE SPRING 2016 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Art History with honors in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Reviewed and approved* by the following: Anna Peterson Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Thesis Supervisor Mary Lou Zimmerman Munn Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Honors Adviser * Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. i ABSTRACT In this paper I will address the relationship between sisters in classical Greek tragedy. I will look at the sisters Antigone and Ismene as well as Electra, Chrysothemis, and Iphigenia in the relevant Greek tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, in order to examine how the dynamics of their sisterhood interact within the realm of patriarchal statehood of Thebes and Mycenae respectively, and how this dynamic potentially disrupts mainstream ideologies of dominating cultural orders. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... iii Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2 Antigone ...................................................................................................... 4 Chapter 3 Electra......................................................................................................... 15 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 15 Sophocles’ Electra ........................................................................................................... 17 Euripides’ Electra ............................................................................................................ 29 Chapter 4 Conclusion .................................................................................................. 36 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 39 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the support of so many people around me, without which this project would have been impossible. I want to thank Dr. Stephanie Larson, who guided me on my semester in Athens, inspired me in so many ways, sparked my interest in women in Greek tragedy, and helped me stumble through Herodotus translation with patience and grace. Your support and influence in Greece has meant so much to me. I also have to thank Dr. Zoe Stamatopoulou for similarly fostering my gradual transition from dreading to loving Greek, who shepherded me through translation neuroses and has provided an overwhelming abundance of support and belief in my abilities. I am extremely grateful to my thesis advisor, Dr. Anna Peterson, who has patiently and intelligently helped me organize my frantic thoughts. I also want to thank Dr. Mary Lou Zimmerman Munn, who has been a wonderful advisor whose support and assistance has been integral in navigating my collegiate career and on, as well as Dr. Mark Munn, who first recruited a very enthusiastic freshman me into CAMS, for which I will forever be grateful. Thank you to my parents, Kathy and Tony Papile, who have given me nothing but love and support. 1 Chapter 1 Introduction Women speak, act, and irrevocably change the shape of their worlds in classical Greek tragedy. They have a powerful presence that allow modern readers to hear ancient women, albeit fictional ones, in a unique way. Tragic women are a remarkable phenomenon that stems from a culture that encourages their silence and submission. Understandably, for many modern scholars these characters engender a fascination. Tragic women are messy, complex, murderous, admirable, and at least as important as their male counterparts in the tragic worlds they inhabit. Tragic women are often understood as members of a few, codified categories that pervade the history of scholarship on the subject. Namely, they are viewed as mothers or murderers—they are on a binary axis between being masculine, crazed gender-transgressors who commit horrible acts of violence, or else they are weaklings who fulfill a feminine ideal of passivity and obedience. Many of the most famous tragic women are understood by these designations. Clytemnestra and Medea, for example, are often understood as the latter group. They slay their husbands and children out of a masculine desire to gain glory from their deeds: Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon for revenge for her slain daughter, Iphigenia, and Medea slays her children out of revenge and a sense of shame when her husband Jason’s spurns her for a new bride.1 As women who act in this way, they are too radical and mentally unstable, and often meet terrible ends for their deeds (as in the case of Clytemnestra). The other category of women is that of those who fulfill the expectations for their gender. These are usually women who sacrifice themselves for their husband or children, or else embody the proper degree of passive obedience. Examples of this group include Jocasta, mother and wife of Oedipus, and Alcestis, who sacrifices herself 1 See Foley 2001. 2 to save her husband’s life.2 These women are, on the one hand, portrayed positively for their proper performance of womanhood, but, on the other, still are women, who are naturally inferior to men in the Greek gender hierarchy. Thus while characters who are read traditionally as hyper-feminine, like Ismene, who is discussed extensively in this paper, are paragons of femininity, they still at the very least are disregarded, especially in comparison to other valorously masculine characters. Not to mention, they usually end up dead as well, often because they have passively received fate’s hand and either are killed or kill themselves out of horror and shame (Jocasta, for example, is not faulted for being a proper Greek woman but her fate is still death). This binary is functional and logical in many aspects, but ultimately reduces these complex characters and silences extant nuances within their characterizations. The other way that scholars have traditionally understood tragic women is through their relationships to other kin (almost always men), specifically, as mothers, daughters, and wives. Occasionally they are regarded as sisters foremost, but that is in cases like that of Antigone and Electra, who deal with a legacy of dead fathers. Tragic women are always engaged with how they relate to their families, as the proper denizens of the oikos, or the Greek private sphere. In this way they must be in constant dialogue with the fulfillment of their duties as women, namely as wives and mothers. More to the point, they always exist in relation to their value as the sources of the next generation (or perhaps merely stewards—as even in Aeschylus’ Orestes Apollo tells the Athenian court that women are only the incubators for the father’s germ, and provide no essential contribution to procreation). Considering women in these ways has resulted in a generous scholarly corpus as well, but exploring other relationships among tragic women also deserves consideration. For these reasons, I explore here the relationships between tragic sisters. Considering the two sister sets of Antigone and Ismene and Electra and Chrysothemis or Iphigenia, I examine the ways these sisters engage with each other, and the ways these relationships shape the overall plot of the play. Using Judith Butler’s framework established in Antigone’s Claim, I first apply her theory to the Antigone and 2 See Wohl 1998. 3 consider the ways Antigone and Ismene reveal and disrupt the mainstream ideologies established in the public sphere of the state within Thebes. After this, I expand the discussion to include Electra, examining the respective plays of Sophocles and Euripides and how Electra’s relationship with her sisters Chrysothemis and Iphigenia influence the presentation of competing ideologies that mirror the public- private, masculine-feminine dualities taken from Butler’s framework. Ultimately, I wish to demonstrate how these sisters interact and relate to each other and how this then disrupts monolithic presentations of mainstream ideologies within these tragedies, and thus complicates the evaluation of how we approach the rhetoric and ethical judgment employed by these characters. 4 Chapter 2 Antigone Women in tragedy occupy a unique position between dramatic expression and real-world gendered expectations of their behavior. This position is further complicated by the relationships that the plays construct between these women. Tragedy, as a genre, gives women a voice, even as it restricts their agency and interactions. Tragic sisters especially form a relationship that places these women in a complex dynamic that can reveal and often disrupt the primary ruling ideology of the world within Greek tragedy. The relationship between Antigone and Ismene represents an important example of this type of relationship. I will start by examining the language of Antigone. The play opens with Antigone talking to her sister. Antigone invokes Ismene in the very first line, calling on her sister as κοινὸν αὐτάδελφον, my own common sibling.3 The importance of their shared kinship reveals itself in this phrasing: the κοινὸν suggests an
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