Exchanges of women between men occur regularly in Greek tragedy-and almost always with catastrophic results. Instead of cementing bonds between men, such exchanges rend them. They allow women, who should be silent objects, to become monstrous subjects, while men often end up as lifeless corpses. But...

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Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	Wohl, Victoria (Author)
Format:	Electronic eBook
Language:	English
Published:	Austin University of Texas Press [2021]
Subjects:	LITERARY CRITICISM / General Ceremonial exchange > Greece Femininity in literature Greek drama (Tragedy) > History and criticism Literature and society > Greece Man-woman relationships in literature Sex role in literature Subjectivity in literature Women and literature > Greece Women in literature
Online Access:	DE-1046 DE-1043 DE-858 DE-859 DE-860 DE-739 DE-473 Volltext
Summary:	Exchanges of women between men occur regularly in Greek tragedy-and almost always with catastrophic results. Instead of cementing bonds between men, such exchanges rend them. They allow women, who should be silent objects, to become monstrous subjects, while men often end up as lifeless corpses. But why do the tragedies always represent the transferal of women as disastrous? Victoria Wohl offers an illuminating analysis of the exchange of women in Sophocles' Trachiniae, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Euripides' Alcestis. She shows how the attempts of women in these plays to become active subjects rather than passive objects of exchange inevitably fail. While these failures seem to validate male hegemony, the women's actions, however futile, blur the distinction between male subject and female object, calling into question the very nature of the tragic self. What the tragedies thus present, Wohl asserts, is not only an affirmation of Athens' reigning ideologies (including its gender hierarchy) but also the possibility of resistance to them and the imagination of alternatives
Item Description:	Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Nov 2021)
Physical Description:	1 Online-Ressource (332 pages)
ISBN:	9780292799974
DOI:	10.7560/791138