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New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes by AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS (Under the direction of Charles Platter) ABSTRACT As early as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, women were either recognized as “completed” by the experience of marriage and motherhood or were perceived as “incomplete” if they failed to serve in either of these capacities. Thus women in literature were often one portrayed as one of two types, the parthenos (“unmarried woman,” “virgin”) or the gynē (“married woman”). In the plays of Sophokles, however, women are often amalgams of the two types, with the traditional characteristics of the virgin and the mother combining with and informing one another. It is my intention to examine Sophokles’ transformative technique by analyzing the central female characters of the Antigone and Trakhiniai—a virgin and a mother—to explore the changing representation of women in fifth-century Athenian literature. INDEX WORDS: Sophokles, Sophocles, Women, Motherhood, Telos, Antigone, Antigone, Trakhiniai, Trachiniae, Deianeira New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes by AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS A.B., Baylor University, 2002 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2004 © 2004 Amanda G. Seamans-Mathis All Rights Reserved New Women on the Tragic Stage: Sophoclean Innovation on Archaic Themes by AMANDA G. SEAMANS-MATHIS Major Professor: Charles Platter Committee: Nancy Felson Naomi Norman Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2004 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many people deserve special thanks for helping and supporting me during the writing of this thesis. It was during Dr. Nancy Felson’s Sophokles class in Spring 2003 that I began to formulate ideas for my thesis, and she has helped me greatly in fixing problems with my various writings. Dr. Naomi Norman has given me a fresh perspective on women in the ancient world from an archaeological standpoint, a topic with which I was not familiar before performing research for this thesis. Dr. Charles Platter, my head thesis adviser, has been very patient with my (only occasional!) procrastination, and has helped me to formulate my ideas and turn them into something more than random musings on Sophokles. Last but not least, my husband Sean has very patiently listened to each and every one of my ideas—good and bad—before I put them down on paper, and encouraged me throughout my process of writing. -iv- TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....................................................................................................................iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................1 2 SOPHOKLES’ ANTIGONE.........................................................................................12 3 SOPHOKLES’ TRAKHINIAI.......................................................................................37 4 CONCLUSION..........................................................................................................75 WORKS CITED................................................................................................................................86 -v- CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION In the literature of archaic and classical Greece, there is a discernible pattern of defining women by their relationships to men. In epic poetry, for example, Homer’s Penelope is variously identified as the daughter of Ikarios (κούρη Ἰκαρίοιο, Odyssey 1.328), wife of Odysseus (Ὀδυσῆα, φίλον πόσιν, Od. 1.363), and mother of Telemakhos (µῆτηρ ἐµή, Od. 1.344); in the dramatic tradition, Sophokles’ Deianeira is the daughter of Oineus (πατρὸς . Οἰνέως, Trakhiniai 6), wife of Herakles (λέχος . Ἡρακλεῖ κριτὸν, Trakh. 27), and mother of Hyllos (δίδαξον, µῆτηρ, Trakh. 64); and the female patients of the Hippocratic corpus are usually identified only by the names of their male relatives, such as “the maiden daughter of Daitharses” (τῆι ∆αιθάρσεος θυγατρὶ παρθένωι, Epidemics 1.16) or “the wife of Mnesistratos” (Μνησιστράτου γυναικί, Epidemics 1.17).1 Repeatedly, women are identified as the daughters and brides, wives and mothers of men, but even within these categories they are usually divided into one of two distinct groups: as Ken Dowden has stated, “females may be parthenoi (maidens) or gynaikes (matrons),” but rarely anything in between.2 This distinction is particularly evident in the 1 On the general silencing of women’s names in the Hippocratic corpus, see, e.g., Lesley Dean-Jones, “Medicine: The ‘Proof’ of Anatomy,” in Women in the Classical World: Image and Text, ed. Elaine Fantham et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 183, on a deceased patient referred to as “the niece of Temenes”: “even when the patient died (as in this case) the physician avoided using her name and referred to her by her relationship to a man.” Indeed, throughout the Hippocratic corpus, there is only one female patient mentioned by name: Melidia, the subject of case study 14 in Epidemics 1. The other four women cited as case studies in Epidemics 1 are referred to as “the wife of” (cases 4, 5, 11) or just “the woman” (case 13). A similar phenomenon occurs in Athenian legal documents of the period. According to David Schaps’ “The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women’s Names” (CQ 27 [1977]: 323-30), the orators practiced “a deliberate avoidance of women’s names” (323), preferring instead “to call [a woman] the relative of such-and-such man” (326). Women left unnamed “are generally ordinary women of the citizen class” (326), but women who are named typically fall into three categories: “women of shady reputation, women connected with the speaker’s opponent, and dead women” (328). 2 Ken Dowden, “Approaching Women through Myth: Vital Tool or Self-Delusion?” in Women in Antiquity: New Assessments, ed. Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 46. Dowden’s analysis, like mine, concerns primarily women of the upper class, since there is a relatively small amount of literature from the archaic and classical periods concerning women of the lower classes. (The dichotomy given here could not, in any -1- Homeric epics, in which the major female characters are typically either virgins (Nausikaä in the Odyssey, Kassandra and Iphianassa in the Iliad) or mothers (Penelope, Arete, and the reclaimed Helen in the Odyssey; Andromakhe and Hekabe in the Iliad), as if no transitional period between virginity and maternity exists. The telos gamou Categorizing women by the dichotomy of maiden/matron, is, of course, inadequate, for this sharp division of social roles allows no gap between marriageability and marriage, only an abrupt transition from parthenos to gynē. In literature, this transition usually requires a “definitive break from maidenhood”3 that is often quite dangerous, for it is at the moment of marriage or, alternatively, defloration that a maiden is most susceptible to the effects of negative forces such as physical mutation (Kallisto, Daphne), imprisonment/enslavement (Danaë, Polyxena), rape (Kassandra by Aias, Helen by Theseus, Iole by Herakles), and even death (Iphigeneia, Antigone, Glauke). A nubile girl’s increased susceptibility to destructive forces renders virginity a time of crisis,4 and it is often portrayed as “a dangerous liminal state to be passed through”5 and quickly resolved by marriage. Left unresolved, virginity can cause anxiety as well as injury: in Odyssey 6, Alkinoös, father of the “untamed virgin” Nausikaä (παρθένος ἀδµής, 6.109), understands his daughter’s sudden desire to go and wash the family’s laundry as case, be applied to women classed as slaves, prostitutes, etc., and reflects only a literary, not a demographic, scheme.) 3 Ibid., p. 55. 4 Matt Neuberg, “How Like a Woman: Antigone’s ‘Inconsistency,’ ” CQ 40.1 (1990): 67. 5 Simon Goldhill, “Character and Action, Representation and Reading: Greek Tragedy and its Critics,” in Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature, ed. Christopher Pelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 104. -2- an indication of interest in and anxiety over a future marriage (6.66-67); Greek medical writers of the fifth century BCE believed that “parthenoi who, despite being ripe for marriage, remain unmarried” suffer from spells of choking and falling and an “erotic fascination with death” that can only be cured by an expedient marriage and pregnancy.6 In addition to curing the ills of maidenhood, marriage also represents the “normal goal” of a girl’s life, by which she may obtain “access to full femininity.”7 Marriage first appears as a “goal,” the Greek telos, in Homer’s Odyssey, when Penelope describes how the goddess Aphrodite raised the orphan daughters of Pandareos, and “went to great Olympos, to Zeus who delights in thunder, to ask for the telos of blooming marriage for the maidens” when they reached nubile age (εὖτ’ Ἀφροδίτη δῖα προσέστιχε µακρὸν Ὄλυµπον,/ κούρηις αἰτήσουσα τέλος θαλεροῖο γάµοιο,/ ἐς ∆ία τερπικέραυνον, 20.73-75). The phrase telos gamoio—in later Greek, telos gamou—“can be safely assumed to mean ‘realization (solemnization) of marriage,’ ”8 but it undoubtedly carries a weightier meaning as well. According to F.M.J. Waanders’ study of the primary meanings of telos in Greek literature, the word connotes both the “ ‘realization, completion’ ” of the state of matrimony and the “ ‘(physical)

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