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

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FROMA I.

ZEITLIN

Playing

the Other:

Theater,

Theatricality,

and the Feminine

in

Greek Drama

FOR

A SPECIMEN OF

SHEER theatrical

power,

it would be difficult

to match the climactic

scene of

Euripides'

Bacchae

(788-861)

where

Pentheus at

last comes under

the spell of his adversary,

the

god

Dionysus,

and

acknowledges

his secret desire

to spy upon

the women

of Thebes who have

left the

city

to

go

as maenads to

the mountain.

His violent

antagonism

toward

the women

who,

in

abandoning

their homes, children,

and domestic

tasks,

have

challenged

the

civic,

masculine

authority

of the

king gives

way

to a sudden

softening

of will-a

yielding

to the

cunning

wiles

of the

god

disguised

on

stage

as the Asiatic

stranger,

the

leader of his own

troops

of maenads.

This first surrender

is followed

by

another.

Giving up

now his

original

intention to marshal his forces for an

open

combat

of men

against

women,

Pentheus

gives

up

his stubborn

claim to an

unequivocal

masculine

identity.

To

see what the

women are

doing

without himself

being

seen,

Pentheus must

trade

his

hoplite

military tactics

for an undercover

operation

that

involves adopting

a devious stratagem

and

assuming

a remarkable

disguise.

He

must

let

the

god

take

him

inside

the

palace

and dress

him as

a woman

in

a

flowing

wig and headdress,

a

long pleated

robe and belt, to which

he adds

the

typical

insignia of the

maenads-the dappled

fawnskin and ritual

thyrsus. When

the

god completes

this elaborate toilette,

Pentheus will also resemble Dionysus

him-

self,

whose effeminate appearance

the king had earlier

mocked.' But as

much

as

they might

seem doublets

of

one

another,

the

power

relations between them

have been decisively

reversed. Now

Dionysus will turn

Pentheus from the

one

who

acts

to

the one

who is

acted upon,

from the one who would inflict pain

and

suffering,

even death,

on the

other,

to the

one who will undergo those experi-

ences himself. For

now, however,

the

preliminary sign

of Pentheus' total defeat,

first at

the hands

of

Dionysus and then

at the hands of

the women, is given

to

us on

stage

in

the visual feminization

of Pentheus when

he is induced against

all

inhibitions of shame

to adopt the costume

and gestures

of the woman.

But if feminization is the emblem of Pentheus' defeat,

Dionysus' effeminacy

is a

sign

of his

hidden power.

Here are two males, cousins

in

fact through their

genealogical ties,

both

engaged

in

a masculine contest for

supremacy. One,

how-

ever,

gains

mastery by manipulating

a

feminized identity

and the other is

van-

REPRESENTATIONS

11 *

Summer 1985

?

THE

REGENTS

OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

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quished when he finally

succumbs to it. What we

might perceive in their

ensemble

at the

moment when the

two males appear

together on stage in similar

dress is

an

instructive spectacle

of the inclusive functions

of the feminine in the

drama-

one on

the side of

femininity as power and the

other on the side of

femininity

as

weakness.

Pentheus, first

ashamed of wearing women's

clothing, and terrified

that he

make a ridiculous

spectacle

of

himself for all

the city to see, now has a

fleeting

intimation of the new

force he has acquired,

exulting in the surge of

unnatural

physical strength that

suffuses

him

and

dreaming of uprooting

mountains with

his bare hands. But

under the god's gentle

prodding, he just as eagerly

abandons

his desire for violence to

acquiesce with pleasure

in the contrary tactics of

hiding

and

deception

that

will confront the women

on

their own terms

(953-56). The

moment of

triumph and

confidence, however, is

brief.

We know already in

advance

what the fate of Pentheus will be

once the

feminized god Dionysus, who

plays his

role

to perfection, delivers over his

disguised

victim, his man clumsily

concealed

in

women's dress, to the

"real" women who will

tear the imposter

apart in a

terrible ritual

sparagmos,

while the

god reverts to his function of

divine

spectator

at the drama he himself

has

arranged

on

stage.

I

have chosen

to

begin

with the

robing

of

Pentheus,

for

beyond its

dramatic

impact

within

the

context of the

play, the mechanics

of

this scene

also

suggests

in its

details a wider and more

emblematic

set

of

significations. These

refer both

to

the

conditions of

Dionysiac

ritual itself as a

deadly

version

of

initiation into

the

mysteries

of

the

god's

worship

and

to the

conditions

of the

theater

of

Dionysus

and the

accepted

terms of its artistic

representations.2

For the

first,

Pentheus

must be dressed as a woman

for

consecration

to the

god

as the

surrogate

beast-

victim he will become

in

the ritual

on the

mountain;

for the

second,

the

costuming

of Pentheus reminds us that the theater

requires

mimetic

disguise by

which it

creates

and

maintains

its

status as dramatic

festival.3 Thus

through

this

scene we

arrive at the

dynamic

basis

of

Greek

drama,

catching

a

momentary

glimpse

of

the

secrets

of

its

ritual

prehistory

as

it

merges

with and is

imitated

by

the

tech-

niques

of the theater.

In

particular,

the fact that Pentheus dons a feminine

cos-

tume and rehearses

in it

before

our

eyes exposes

perhaps

one of the

most marked

features

of

Greek

theatrical

mimesis, namely

that men are the

only

actors

in

this

civic

theater;

in order to

represent

women

on

stage,

men must

always put

on

a

feminine costume and mask.4 What this means

is that it is not

a woman who

speaks

or

acts

for herself and in herself on

stage;

it is

always

a man who

imper-

sonates her.5

Still

further,

if

we

also consider that

in

order

to

direct

the

proceedings

of

the

drama,

to

manipulate

its theatrical

effects,

contrive

its

plots,

set its

stage,

and

control its

mimetic

play

of

illusion and

reality,

Dionysus,

the

god

of the

theater,

must

also take on

womanish

traits,

then

perhaps

we

may

venture

yet

further: can

there

be some

intrinsic connections

linking

the

phenomenon

of Athenian

trag-

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edy, invented

and developed

in a historical context

as

a

civic art form,

and

what

the society culturally

defines

as feminine

in

its

sex/gender system?6

There is

nothing new

in

stressing

the associations of

Dionysus

and the fem-

inine 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's

bodies are perceived

as more fluid,

more permeable,

more

open

to affect

and

entry

from

the

outside,

less

easily

controlled

by

intel-

lectual and

rational means.

This perceived physical

and

cultural instability

ren-

ders them weaker

than men;

it is also all

the more a source

of

disturbing power

over them, as

reflected

in

the

fact

that

in

the divine world it is

feminine agents,

for the most part, who,

in

addition

to

Dionysus,

inflict men with madness-

whether Hera, Aphrodite,

the

Erinyes,

or even Athena as in Sophocles' Ajax.

On

the other

hand,

we might want to

view

the androgyny

of

Dionysus,

already

in

Aeschylus

called a gunnis

(womanish man)

and pseudanor

(counterfeit

man,

frag.

61

Nauck,

2nd ed.), as

a true mixture

of 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

attests

to the coin-

cidentia

oppositorum

that

challenges

the hierarchies

and rules

of the

public

mas-

culine

world,

reintroducing

into it confusions,

conflicts,

tensions, and ambiguities,

insisting always

on the more

complex nature

of

life than masculine aspirations

would allow.7 Such a view would stress

male and

female

aspects

alike;

it would

regard the god

as embodying

a

dynamic process

or

as

configuring

in

his

person

an

alternate

mode

of

reality.

Convincing

as this view

may be,

it

runs the

risk

of

underrating

the

fact

that

it

is

precisely Dionysus'

identification with the

feminine

that gives

him

and

his theater their

power.

Along

the same lines,

in

the

quest

for

equivalence

between

the

genders,

one

could remark,

not without

justice,

that

although

all

the

actors are

male

in

tragedy,

we

find

that

within the

plays

feminized

males are countered

by

masculinized

women: for

example,

Aeschylus' Clytemnestra

of the

"man-counseling

mind"

(Agamemnon),

Euripides'

Medea, and,

of

course,

the

maenadic

Agave herself,

who

in

the Bacchae

boasts of her warrior

prowess

over the

body

of

Pentheus,

as

yet unrecognized

as

the son whom she has killed.

This notion

of

a balanced,

symmetrical

inversion

finds

support

in

Greek

festivals outside

Athens where

men

and women

change

their

costumes

for a

day,

each imitating

the

appearance

and

behavior

of

the other.8 Better

yet, there is evidence

that

in initiation rites at

puberty

or

sometimes

in

nuptial

arrangements,

young men and

women

in

their

own

spheres

temporarily adopt

the dress and

behavior

of

the

other sex.9 Such

reversals are

usually explained

according to

a ritual logic that

insists that each

gender

must for

the

last

time,

as

it were,

act the

part

of

the other before

assuming

the

unequivocal

masculine and feminine identities

that cultural ideology

requires.

10

As

a

theoretical concept, this

proposition

makes eminent sense.

On the level

of

practice,

however, these symmetries

are often

more apparent

than real; the

Playing

the Other

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notion conforms

better

with our

habits

of binary thinking

than

with recorded

evidence

as these

rites are far better

and

more numerously

attested

for men

than

for women,

not least

because their

performance,

aimed

at creating

men

for the

city, is of

greater concern

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

temporary

reversal before

its decisive

correction.

They do

not extend

their analysis

to consider

what

the various

aspects

of the

actual experience

might imply

for achieving

male identity.

What

more specifically

might these

actions

and attitudes

teach him?

How might

the processes

of

imitat-

ing the feminine

prepare

him

for access to

adult status,

other than

to teach

him

the behaviors

he must

later scrupulously

avoid? Unless

there

were something

to

learn and

something

necessary

to repeat,

we would not

need the

genre of tragedy

at all to call these different

roles 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 risk

of

assuming

mutually

inverted categories

without looking

to the

internal

dynamics

of

tragic

conventions that shape and

predict the

conditions

of

this

exchange.

Even more,

such a

concept tends

to

reduce

the scope

of

the feminine

in

the

drama. It

is too limited

to encompass

her double

dimensions-a

model

of both weakness

and strength,

endowed

with

traits and

capacities

that have

negative

and

positive

implications

for

self

and

society.

Thus

my emphasis

falls

not

upon

the

equal

interchange

or reversal

of

male

and

female

roles

but

upon

the

predominance

of the feminine in

the

theater,

a

phenomenon

that

used

to

(and

may still)

puzzle

some

commentators,

who

per-

ceived

a serious discrepancy

between

the mutedness

of women

in

Athenian

social

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

content

and

themes of the various

dramas

in

their

political

and

social dimensions

but on the

implications

of theater and

the-

atricality

as

these

are

integrally

related to and

reflective

of the thematic

preoc-

cupations

of drama.

If

tragedy

can be viewed

as

a

species

of recurrent

masculine

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

relief

may

well merit

the

speculations

I

am about

to

offer on

theater, representation,

plot

and

action,

experience

and

identity-all

linked

in some radical

way

with the feminine.

From the

outset,

it

is

essential

to understand

that

in

Greek

theater,

as

in

fact

in

Shakespearean

theater,

the self

that is

really

at stake

is to be identified

with

the male, while

the

woman

is

assigned

the

role

of the radical

other.'3 It seems

unfair

perhaps

that,

given

the

numbers

and

importance

of female

protagonists

in

Greek

tragedy (by

contrast,

it should

be

said,

to

the case of

Shakespeare),'4

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theoretical

critics

from Aristotle

on never

consider

anyone

but the male

hero

as

the central

feature

of the genre;

they

devote

their attention

to

outlining

his

traits,

configurations,

and

dilemmas.

Yet

despite Clytemnestra,

Antigone,

Phaedra,

Medea,

and many

others, it

must be acknowledged

that

this critical

blindness

is

also insight.

Even

when female

characters

struggle

with the conflicts

generated

by the

particularities

of their

subordinate

social position,

their demands

for

iden-

tity

and self-esteem

are

nevertheless

designed primarily

for

exploring

the

male

project

of selfhood

in

the larger

world

as these

impinge

upon

men's claims

to

knowledge,

power,

freedom,

and self-sufficiency-not

for some greater

entitle-

ment

or privilege,

as

some have thought,

that the

female

might gain

for

herself,

not even

for revising

notions

of what

femininity

might be

or

mean.

Women as

individuals

or chorus

may give

their names

as titles

to plays;

female

characters

may

occupy the center

stage

and leave

a far

more indelible emotional impression

on their spectators

than

their male counterparts

(as

Antigone,

for

example,

over

Creon).

But functionally

women

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

sometimes

helpers

or saviors

for the male

characters.

When

elaborately repre-

sented,

they may

serve as anti-models

as well as hidden

models

for that masculine

self, as

we will

see,

and,

concomitantly,

their

experience

of

suffering

or

their

acts

that lead

them

to disaster

regularly

occur

before and

precipitate

those

of

men.

15

An excellent

case

in

point

is

Sophocles'

Trachiniae,

a

play

that will serve us

well

throughout

this

essay.

Although

the distress and

despair

of

Deianeira,

the

innocent,

virtuous

wife, commands

our

attention

for most

of the play,

and

although

she

loses none

of our

sympathy

when

unwittingly

destroying

her hus-

band Heracles

for love of

him, we come

to realize that

her entire

experience,

her

actions

and

reactions, are

in

truth a

route for achieving

another

goal,

the real

telos or

end of the

drama. She

is the agent

designated

to

fulfill the deceptive,

riddling

oracles which

predict

the tragic

destiny of

Heracles

rather than

a well-

earned respite

from his labors here on

earth.

She kills herself

offstage

in remorse,

but his are the sufferings

we

witness publicly

on

stage, and

it is he who,

in his

first and

last appearance

before

us, provides

the

climax and

resolution

of the

drama.

Moreover,

if

we consider

more

generally

that the

tragic

universe

is one that

the

specifically

male

self

(actor

and/or

spectator)

must discover

for

himself as

other

than

he

originally

imagined

it to

be,

then the example

of

Deianeira is

particularly

instructive

for

articulating

the

complex

position

occupied

by

that

feminine

other.

For in the course of

the

action,

Deianeira indeed does

come

to

that

discovery

for 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

fiery potential

had

been concealed within

the recesses

of

the

house until

exposed

to the

warming

heat

of

the sun. But

her

education

into the treacherous

opacity

Playing

the Other 67

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of the tragic world

holds no interest for Heracles,

preoccupied as he is

with

unraveling the riddle

of his own story. The ensemble

of her life and death seems

to have nothing to

teach Heracles that he 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 prescribes for the boy's future

in terms that define him only

as his father's son.

Medea

in

Euripides'

play comes closest to the

demand for an equivalence

of

that

feminine

self to the male, preferring, as she

says, to stand three times in

the

van

of

battle than

to

bear

one

child (Medea

250-51).

Yet

although she has

a

defined

geographical

destination

to

which

she will

go once she leaves Corinth

in

exile, having obtained

in advance from its

king the promise of sanctuary

in

Athens,

her

spectacular

departure from the

city on the dragon chariot of

her

immortal ancestor,

the Sun, suggests that there

can

be

no place

for

her

in the

social structure down

here

on

earth.

A woman who insists on the

binding

nature

of the

compact she

made

on her own

with

a man, who defends her right to honor

and

self-esteem

in

terms suspiciously

resembling those of the male heroic code,

and finally

who

would

reverse

the cultural flow

in

founding a new genre of poetry

that celebrates now the exploits

of women rather than those of men

(as

the chorus

sings, 410-45)

is meant not

for

human but superhuman status.16 Accordingly,

it

is only logical that

she disappear

once

the drama

is over-upward and out

of

sight. Yet even in

this revolutionary play the typology

still holds. Medea's formal

function

in

the

plot

is to

punish

Jason

for

breaking

his sacred

oath

to

her,

through

an

exacting

retribution of

tragic justice,

and

she is the

typical

and

appropriate

agent,

even

if embodied

in

exotic

form,

for

accomplishing

that crucial end.

Let us return

now to the central

topic-to

identify

those

features that are

most

particular

to

drama, serving

to differentiate

it

from all

other

art

forms that

precede it: narrative

(epic),

choral

lyric

and

dance,

solo

songs,

and

perhaps

even

stylized exchanges

of

dialogue. Though profoundly

indebted,

to be

sure,

to

ritual

representations

and

reenactments,

to ritual costumes and

masks,

drama

develops

along

the

deeper

lines

of

character

and

plot

and establishes

its own

conventions

and entitlements

in the more secular

sphere.'7

At the risk of drastic

(I repeat, drastic)

oversimplification,

I

propose

four

principal

elements as

indispensable

traits

of the theatrical

experience,

all inter-

linked

in

various ways

with one another and

to the sum total of the

tragic

spec-

tacle. And

I

will assume another

more

dangerous

risk

by boldly proposing

in

advance that

each of these

traits can find

not its

only,

to be

sure,

but

its

more

radical cultural

referent

in

the traits and

aspects

that the

society

most associates

with the feminine domain.

First,

the

representation

of the

body

itself

on

stage

as such-its

somatic

dimensions and

the

sense

of its

physical

reality. Second,

the

arrangement

of

architectural

space

on

stage

that

continually suggests

a

relational tension between

inside and

outside.

Third,

the

plot itself,

that

is,

the

strategies by

which theater

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best represents

a

tragic story

on stage

and contrives

to bring

that story

through

often

surprising

means to

the

conclusion

that the terms of its myth

demand.

In

this sense,

plot

as shape

of the

story

often coincides

in

fact,

as we will

see,

with

the other

connotation

of plot

as intrigue

and deception.

And finally,

the most

extensive

category-the

condition

of theatrical

mimetism

itself,

limited

in this

discussion

to the

question of

role playing

and disguise-or

more generally,

the

representation

of

a self as other

than

it seems or

knows itself

to be, a

self with

inner and

outer dimensions.

The

Body

The

emphasis

in

theater

must

inevitably

fall

upon

the

body-the

per-

forming body of the

actor as

it embodies

its

role,

figures

its

actions,

and is

shown

to us

in

stylized poses,

gestures,

and

attitudes.

We see

this

body

before us in

the

theatron,

the viewing

place,

in rest and

in movement.

We observe

how it

occupies

different areas

at

different

times

on

stage,

how it

makes its entrances and

exits,

how it

is situated

at times

alone or,

more often,

in

relation

with

others. This

performing

body

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

misadventure

of

the

human

body."

What

interests the audience

most in the somatics of the

stage

is

the body

in

an

unnatural state

of

pathos

(suffering)-when

it

falls

farthest

from

its ideal

of strength

and integrity.

We notice

it most

when it is

reduced to

a helpless

or

passive

condition-seated,

bound,

or constrained

in

some other

way;

when

it

is in the

grip of

madness or

disease,

undergoing

intermittent

and spasmodic

pain,

alternating

between

spells

of

dangerous

calm before the stormy

symptoms

assail the

body again.

Tragedy

insists

most

often on exhibiting

this

body,

even

typically

bringing

back

corpses

killed

offstage

so as to expose

them

to public

view.

When characters

are still

alive,

some

demand us to witness the

spectacle

of their

suffering

so we

may pity

them. Others

call

for

a covering to

hide

their shame

or

wish to be hidden

inside

the house-or

in

some supernatural

way to vanish

from

the

eyes

of the

beholders.

More to the

point, it is

at those

moments

when the

male finds himself

in a

condition

of weakness that

he too becomes

acutely

aware

that

he

has

a body-and

then

perceives

himself, at

the limits

of pain, to

be most

like

a

woman.

Heracles,

at the

end of

Sophocles'

Trachiniae,

when his flesh is being

devoured

by

the poison of the

fateful

robe, appeals

to his son:

"Pity me,

/ 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 that

before.

/

Always

without

a

groan

I

followed a

Playing

the Other

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painful

course. / Now

in

my misery

I am

discovered

a

woman" (Trachiniae

1070-75;

cf.

Euripides

Heracles

1353-56). Sophocles' Ajax,

in

despair

after the

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

temptation to yield through pity to his

wife's

entreaties.

If

he tempers his will,

his

tongue that is hard and firm like a sword, he has blunted its sharp edge; he

has

in effect feminized

it,

as he

says (ethdlunthen,

for the

sake of a woman [Ajax

650-52]).

A

warrior man

often likens himself to

a

sword;

his

mind is obdurate,

his

will and words

are

whetted

like iron

(cf. Aeschylus Seven Against Thebes 529

-

30,

715). His is

the instrument of

power

that

wounds others, while his body remains

impenetrable to outside forces. Ajax

will

harden his will; he will have his heroic

death

by

the

sword

of

iron.

But how?

By burying

that

sword

in

the earth

and

falling upon it, breaking through

the

flesh

of

his side

(pleuran diarrexanta, 834).

As he

violates

the

boundaries

of his

body,

he

also violates tragic convention by

staging

his

death

as a

public

act.

Yet

paradoxically,

there is

yet

another

anomaly

in

the method

he

chooses. Suicide

is

a

solution in

tragedy normally reserved only

for women-and what we

are

given

to witness is

this convention borrowed for a

man's version

of it. A heroic death then

in the

woman's

way,

a

whetted

will

pen-

etrated

by

a whetted

weapon, befitting (as

we

will discuss

further

in

another

context)

the curious

ambiguities

of

this

most

masculine hero.'9

My

last

example

here is

Hippolytus

in

Euripides' play. Refusing eros, refusing

the

touch,

even the

sight

of a

woman,

he is

brought

back on

stage

in

mortal agony

after his horses had

stampeded

in

fright

before

the

apparition

of the bull from

the

sea. Then

he

cries

out that

pains

dart

through

his head

and

spasms leap up

in his

brain,

while

his desire

is

now all for a sword to cleave himself in

two

and

"put

his life at

last to bed"

(Hippolytus 1351-52, 1371-77).

His

symptoms

are those

of

a

woman,

racked

with

the

pain

of childbirth

or

the torment of

sexual desire.20

We remember

then

Phaedra's

last

words,

which

prophesied

that

he

would

"share

in her

disease" (Hippolytus 730-31)-the deadly pangs

of

unrequited

eros that

earlier had reduced

her

to a sick and

suffering body.

Yet in

that

first

scene,

when

no one

on

stage yet

knows the cause

of her

malady,

the chorus

speaks

in

generic

terms about the

body

of a woman.

They

call

it

a

dustropos harmonia,

an

ill-tuned

harmony;

it suffers

the

misery

of

helplessness (amechania),

and is

open

to the

breeze

that darts

through

the

womb

in

pregnancy

as well as to the

torments

of

eros.21 This

body

is

permanently

at

odds

with

itself, subject

to a

congenital

dis-

sonance between

inside and outside. Woman

can never

forget

her

body,

as she

experiences

its

inward

pain,

nor

is

she

permitted

to

ignore

the fact of its

outward

appearance

in

that

finely

tuned consciousness

she

acquires

with

respect

to

how

she

might

seem to

the

eyes

of

others.

Bodiliness is what most

defines

her in

the

cultural

system

that associates

her with

-physical processes

of birth

and death

and

stresses the

material dimensions

of

her

existence,

as

exemplified,

above

all,

in

Hesiod's canonical

myth

of how

the first

woman, Pandora,

was

created.22

Men

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have bodies, to be sure,

but in the gender system

the role of representing

the

corporeal side of life in

its helplessness and submission

to constraints is primarily

assigned to

women.

Thus, it

is

women

who most

often tend the bodies of others, washing

the

surface

of

the body

or

laying

it out for its funeral. Theirs is the task to supply the

clothing

that covers

the

body,

and

they

have a storehouse

of robes that

may

encircle the male

victim

in

its textured folds.

When men

suffer or die

in

the

theatrical space,

it

is

the

female

who most

typically

is the cause. She seems

to

know, whether

consciously

or

not,

how

vulnerable,

how

open-how

mortal,

in

fact-is the

human

body.

These

figures may

be goddesses like Aphrodite

and

Hera or,

above

all,

the

Erinyes, avenging

ministers

of retributive

justice.

But these

are also women

like

Clytemnestra, Deianeira,

Hecuba, and, of course, Agave,

the

mother of Pentheus.23

On

the other

hand,

dressed as a

woman,

Pentheus makes the first discovery

of

his corporeal

self. Before this

he

defends

himself

militantly against any

touch

of

the other.

But now

he

allows Dionysus

to make

contact with 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

stray

locks of hair

peeping

out

from

beneath its snood (Bacchae

925-38).

With this

laying

on of

hands,

Dionysus

breaches that physical

integrity

so

dear

to the male

and

prepares

Pentheus

for

the terrible

sequel,

when the

voyeur, coming

to see

as

a

spectator

what he

imag-

ines are the women's

illicit

physical

contacts with others,

is

himself

exposed

to

view,

his

body

becoming

instead the focus

of their

ministering

hands.

Then

they

indeed

touch

his

body,

and

in the

strength

induced

by

their maenadic state easily

tear it

apart

in

the literal act

of

sparagmos.

In

this primitive

regression, women

undo the body; its structures cannot

hold, its limbs are

unbound, and the masculine

self, originally so intent

on

oppos-

ing himself to anything

feminine, is fragmented

and flies apart. Female violence

may

be viewed

through

the lens

of role

reversal,

but in the

Greek imagination

the

maenadic

woman is

regularly

endowed with

this

power, especially

over

the

masculine

body,

and

is the

model

herself

for

the male

who,

when he too is seized

like

Euripides'

Heracles

in

the grip

of

this madness,

can only be described

as

"playing

the Bacchant" and imitating the part

of the woman.24

Theatrical

Space

Second

is the

space

itself

on

stage

in

the

Greek

theater,

where the

human actors situate themselves and the theatrical

action takes place before

the

spectator. By

convention this

space

is

constructed

as an outside in front

of a

facade of

a

building,

most often a house

or palace,

and there is a door that leads

to

an

inside that

is

hidden

from

view. What happens

inside must always in some

way

be

brought outside-for

example, through

use of the wheeled platform

Playing the

Other 71

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called the ekkyklema, most

often used to display the corpses of those

bodies who

have met their fatal doom

within the house-visual proof of

the violence that

must also by convention take

place offstage. But the very business

of entrances

and

exits,

of

comings

and goings through the door of the

house, continually

establishes a symbolic dialectic

between public and private, seen and

unseen, open

and

secret, even

known and unknown.25

In this simple mapping

of spatial relations, the stage conventions

not only

chart

the

bounded areas

of social relations between the genders,

which assign

men to the outside and

women to the inside, but they also suggest

an analogy to

the

tragic world itself, which

in the course of its plot and actions

inevitably reveals

its hidden and unknown

dimensions.26

Earlier I defined the tragic universe as one that is other than

the self origi-

nally imagined it to

be.

Going

one step further, we may add that

tragedy is the

epistemological form par

excellence. What it does best through

the resources of

the

theater is

to

chart a path

from ignorance to knowledge, deception

to reve-

lation, misunderstanding to

recognition. The characters act out

and live through

the

consequences of

having clung

to a

partial single

view of the world and them-

selves.27 In the

process,

in

the conflicts and tensions that

mark

the

relations

between the opposing characters,

all come

in

some way to experience

the com-

plexities

of

the world-its

multiple dimensions, its deceptions

and illusions. Inside

and outside

organize

the

dramatic action

of the

drama,

and

they

refer

not

only

to the shifting planes of

reality (the known

and

the

unknown)

but to the

tragic

self-both

mind

and

body-and

find their

material

referent

in

the house

and

the

facade

it

presents

to

the

outside world.

The

house,

let

us now

observe,

is the

property

of

the

male

and his

family

line. The oikos

is

the

visual

symbol

of

paternal heredity

that

entitles sons to

succeed their

fathers as

proprietor

of

its wealth

and movable

goods

and

as ruler

over its inhabitants.

As the male

in

tragedy

is often

conflated with

king,

the house

extends further as

a locus

of

masculine

power

to include

the

sign

of

sovereignty

over the

city

as

a

whole,

and the

solidity

of

its architectural

structure

symbolically

guarantees

the

enduring

stability

of the social order.

Yet the

house,

as

we

know,

is more

primarily

the

proper

domain

of the

woman,

to which

the

social

rules of

the

culture

assign her,

while

its

men

go

forth

into the outside world to

pursue

manly accomplishments

in

war

and

politics.

Thus,

in

conflicts between house and city

or

between domestic

and political

concerns that are

the recurrent

preoccupations

of

tragic plots,

the

woman, whether

wife

or

daughter,

is shown

as best

representing

the

positive

values and

structures

of

the

house,

and

she

typically

defends

its interests

in

response

to some masculine

violation

of its

integrity.

As a

result, however,

of

the stand

she

takes,

the woman

also

represents

a subversive threat

to male

authority

as an

adversary

in a

power

struggle

for control that

resonates

throughout

the

entire

social and

political

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system,

raising

the terrifying specter

of rule

by

women.

Here

we

might

note

how

strongly alien

is the presence

of this

feminine

other

who,

in

asserting

legitimate

values most

associated

with

her

social role,

is also

perceived

as

illegitimately

asserting

the rights

reserved

for the masculine project

of

self.

She never achieves

these

in

any

permanent

way.

But in the contest

over rights to

control

domestic

space

that

the stage

conventions exploit,

it is

the

woman and

not the man who,

by

reason

of her close

identification

with the

house as

her intimate

scene,

consistently

rules

the relations

between

inside

and

outside

and shows

herself

as

standing

on

the

threshold

betwixt

and between.

Men find

out

in tragedy

that

they are likely

to

enter that

interior

domain

mostly to

their

peril,

whether

Agamemnon

as

he

walks upon

the

crimson

carpets

his

wife has

spread

to lead

him to his death

at

her hands

within the

house,

or

Hippolytus

confronted

inside

with the

nurse's revelation

to

him

of Phaedra's

guilty

secret that

is the

beginning

of his

doom,

or

Polymestor

in

Euripides'

Hecuba

whom the Trojan queen

lures

into the tent to

take a woman's

revenge

on

the

perfidious

Thracian

king

who

has killed

her child.

As a

general

principle,

the

absent hero returns

to his house

either

never

to

enter through

its

doors

again,

as for the extreme

case of Heracles in the

Trachin-

iae,

or to meet

with

his own destruction

within,

as

in the cases cited

above,

or

finally,

like the Heracles

in

Euripides'

play,

to

go

mad

once inside the

house,

slaying

his wife

and

children and

literally

insuring

the fall

of the house

by

top-

pling

its columns.

On the other

hand,

if

the

male would successfully

penetrate

the

interior

of the house

and reclaim

it for

his

own,

he typically

requires

feminine

assistance,

best exemplified

in the fact

that,

as we

will

discuss

further

in

a different

context,

all

the extant

versions

of

Orestes' story

insist

upon

pairing

him with

his

sister,

Electra.

Men

imagine

they

can control that interior

space

by attempting

to control

the women within

it,

and

they object,

often

violently

as Pentheus does

in

the

Bacchae,

when

in

the

most dramatic

reversal

they leave

the stifling

environment

of

the

house

to venture

forth to the

open

(although

equally

uncivic

world)

of

forest and

mountains.

But the

king's

authority lapses

on all fronts.

He

is unable

to

bring

back

his Theban women

from the mountains to

put

them

in

their rightful

place,

-ultimately-going

out

to

meet

them

on

their new

terrain

with the

results

we

already

know. But he

fails too

on

domestic

territory

when

he

would

lock

up

the

other maenads

(and

their

leader

Dionysus) and

imprison

them

within

the house.

Literally

binding

them with

fetters,

he discovers

all

too

soon the

futility

of

apply-

ing

coercive

force as

they easily-magically-loosen

themselves

from his

restraints,

while his

larger

demands

for

mastery

over

the

house literally

collapse

when

Dionysus sends

the

earthquake

to

shake the

oikos to

its very

foundations.

The situation

of

Pentheus leads

to

a

further

point.

The

king erects

barriers

around himself

(and

his

psyche)

against

the invasion

of

Dionysus

even as

he

Playing

the Other

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struggles to maintain the

integrity of the house and the walled city of Thebes.28

If tragedy,

as I have suggested, is the epistemological genre par excellence,

which

continually calls

into

question

what we know and how we think we know it, it

does so

often by confronting

the assumptions

of

rational thought with those

psychological necessities that

may not be denied.

The master example of

Pentheus therefore gives another turn to the dialectic

of

inside and outside that

focuses on the woman and the house as containers for

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 authority over it

therefore takes place on several

levels-the social, cognitive, and psychological.

If

men enter this domain,

assuming their legitimate rights to its custody, only to

meet with a welcome they had not

foreseen,

at the same time

they

also

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, conveyed through

the catalyzing person and

actions

of

the

feminine, puts

insistent

pressure

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 expressly posed

in

spatial terms that send the women outside and

situate the man within, the

stage conventions are used to their best

effect as

Pentheus leaves the interior

space now for the last time-for his liberation and

for

his destruction-dressed, as we

might

now

expect,

like

a woman.

The Plot

Third,

the

plot

itself-that which

brings

about the

recognition,

the

anagnorisis-the plot

whose

process

Aristotle

describes

as

a

combination

of

desis,

binding, and lusis, unbinding,

denouement,

and which

in

its

complex

form

he

calls

by the corresponding Greek

term,

a

sumploke,

an

interweaving

as that which

describes

the

fabric,

the texture

of

the

play (Poetics 1455b).

At a

higher level, these

terms are even more

suggestive

as

they might

remind

us how the

tragic

world

works

its

ruinous effects

through

modes

of

entrapment

and

entanglement

that

causes

its characters first to stumble

through ignorance

and

error and then

to

fall.

In

the elaborate

tragic game,

the

metaphoric patterns

of

binding

and

unbinding

continually operate

in

a

reciprocal

tension as

signs

of

constraint and

necessity,

on

the

one

hand,

and

of

dissolution

and

death,

on

the

other, defining the parameters between

which characters

are

caught

in

the

"double

bind."29

In

the cognitive psychology

of

tragic man,

inner

choice and external

necessity

(or ethos, character,

and

daimon,

divine

power) finally converge

to sanction what-

ever form of

tragic justice

the

plot

demands

for

its

satisfying

fulfillment. Thus

the

"nature

of

tragic

action

appears

to be

defined

by

the

simultaneous

presence

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of a 'self'

and something

greater at

work that is divine."30

In this

sense, the gods

finally may

be said to

direct the energy

of the

action and to

be understood

retrospectively

as supporting

and advancing

the outcome

of the

myth.

Gods sometimes

appear

on

stage

(and

I have

already

remarked how fre-

quently these

figures are

goddesses),

although most

often they

operate

from afar

as inhabiting

that other

unknown dimension

of existence

which mortals

may only

grasp dimly

and, of course,

too late.

But it is remarkable

how often

that energy

is channeled

through

the feminine

other, who serves

as their

instrument

even

when

she

acts or seems

to act on her

own terrain

and

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 frequently

control

the plot

and the activity

of

plotting and

manipulate

the duplicities

and illusions

of the tragic

world.

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

forces that make

sudden

forays

into

human

lives,

unsettling

all

their

typical

assumptions.

On the

other

hand,

that same

exclusion

which relegates them

to the inside as mistresses

of the

interior

space

equips

them

for deviousness

and

duplicity, gives

them a

talent,

or at least

a

reputation,

for

weaving

wiles and fabricating plots,

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

discrepant

awareness-what

one character knows

and the other

doesn't

or

what

none of the

characters

know but that

the audience

does. Thus

it is that irony

is

tragedy's

characteristic

trope, that several

levels of

meaning operate

at the same

time. Characters

speak

without knowing

what they

say, and

misreading

is the

typical and

predictable

response to the

various cues

that others

give.

This

pervasive

irony may manifest

itself in many

ways, and

it

owes

its effec-

tiveness

to

a strong conviction

about the

ambiguous,

even opaque

nature of verbal

communication

that is

reflected

in the belief in oracles.

These

riddling,

divine

utterances invite

interpretation

and/or evasion

and,

at the same time, suggest,

when the outcome

proves

disastrous,

how

misguided

and

ignorant

these

human

attempts

may

be.

Apollo

and his oracle often serve as a

primary

source,

as Oed-

ipus,

his most

famous

client,

confirms. But other factors

make for

dramatic

irony,

particularly

in connection

with

the

deceptive powers

of the feminine

and

the

special

verbal skills that

accompany

these.

Clytemnestra

in

Aeschylus' Agamemnon

is the

most powerful

paradigm of the

woman

who plots, who

through the riddling

doubleness

of the language

to which

she

resorts

builds the play

to its climax

in the murder

of her husband

within the

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 conflict

between desire

and honor

Playing

the Other

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and

determined

to

preserve

her integrity

at

any cost,

Theseus'

queen,

despite

herself

or rather

in

defense

of that

apparently

indefensible

feminine

self, fab-

ricates

the lying

message

that

will implicate

Hippolytus

as the

cause of

her death

and lead to

his literal entanglement

in the reins

of

his own chariot.

The pattern

holds

too even

at the

other end

of the

dramatic

spectrum

where

in the late romantic

plays of

Euripides,

which

shift to

exotic locales,

the

feminine

other takes

on a

different configuration

as

the remote

object

of a mythic

quest.

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 rescuing

the

feminine,

they

find out

they have

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 that

of

her menfolk,

as does Iphigenia

in the Iphigenia

in Tauris

or Helen in the play

of the same name.

The men here

are only

adjuncts

of

the

women;

they offer prior

schemes of

their

own but inevitably

yield to

and coop-

erate

in

the woman's

superior

plans

that all involve elaborate

dramas

of

deception.

If we take a rapid

inventory

of

the plot as

intrigue

in the

extant

plays of

the

tragic

corpus,

some interesting

principles

emerge.3'

First,

it is

the women

whose

plots

are more

generally

successful.32

If men

succeed,

however,

it is

precisely

because they

have

allied themselves

with women-for

example,

in the Euripidean

plays

just cited,

and

more

broadly

in the various treatments

of the Orestes

story

where

Orestes

succeeds

in

avenging

his father

through

the murder of

his

mother

because he

has

joined

forces

with his

sister,

Electra.

Thus the

recognition

between

them must

necessarily

precede

the

praxis

of

vengeance.

In the

Choephoroi

of

Aes-

chylus

(the

second

play

of the

Oresteia),

for

example,

it

is

only

after the

long

interchange

between himself,

Electra,

and the female

chorus of libation

bearers

that

Orestes

is

able

at last

to

interpret

the dream

of

Clytemnestra,

and

thus,

psychologically

equipped,

is

ready

to

assume a

stranger's

disguise

that will

gain

him

successful

entry

into

the

feminine

domain

of

the

house.33

Second,

whereas

deceit and

intrigue

are condemned

in

woman,

they

are

also

seen as natural

to her

sphere

of

operations

and the

dictates of her nature.34

For

the

male,

however,

resort

to

dolos,

trickery,

is

what

most undermines masculine

integrity

and

puts

him under

the

gravest

of

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

adversary

status

comes closer to

the role of melo-

dramatic

villain.35

The case of Orestes

at home in

Argos

is

even

more

infor-

mative

in

this

regard.

His

success,

it is

true,

depends

on

reunion

with his

sister,

but his

resort

to

trickery

and

disguise

(dolos,

mechane)

entails

a further risk to

his

masculine

stature,

no

matter

how

urgent

and

obligatory

is his task

of

vengeance.

Appeal

to

the

authority

of

Apollo

the

god

is therefore

needed to

justify

this mode

of

action.

The

god (in

both

Aeschylus

and

Sophocles)

must

explicitly

decree

a

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retribution

that

exactly

matches

the

original

crime:

as

she

(Clytemnestra)

killed,

so

must

she

be

killed in

turn-by

guile

(Aeschylus

Choephoroi

556-59;

Sophocles

Electra

32-37).

Sophocles'

Trachiniae,

that

schematic

model of

gender

relations,

again

sup-

plies

an

excellent

version

of

the

norm.

Heracles

too

practices

deception, first

to

conquer

the

girl

Iole, the

current

object

of his

erotic desire

and the

immediate

cause of

all

his

woe,

and then

to

introduce

her

secretly

into

the

house. But in

his

case,

deception

returns

quite

literally

(and most

dramatically)

against

him.

His

deception,

revealed

by others to his

wife, activates

the

Centaur's

ruse,

plotted

long

ago

as

the

deadly

poison

entrusted as

a

secret

love

charm to

Deianeira's

safekeeping

inside

the

house. The

point is

that

innocent

as

Deianeira

may

be of

conscious

intent

to harm

her

husband,

she still

easily

proves a better

and

more

successful

plotter

than he.

Masculine

guile

is

repaid

in

full-even when

retalia-

tion

does

not

openly

bear

the

name of

revenge.

If this

Heracles

conforms

so well

to the

normative

pattern,

Ajax,

that other

great

hero,

does

not.

His

is a

curious

case,

but

one

whose

anomaly

might

just

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

vicissitudes of time

and

change. With

this

speech

he

puts

off

those

who

would

guard

him

and

leaves

himself

alone

to

stage

that

elaborate

suicide

to

which

I

have

earlier

referred.

Critics

have

energetically contested the

status of this

speech

as truth or

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

intrinsically

true to

the

genre.

How

then

can we

read the

enigma

of

this

speech?

Better

still,

how

can

we

read

Ajax,

the

traditional

epic

hero,

who

would resort

to a

deceptive

plot

that

goes

against the

grain of

strict

masculine

values

in

which

Ajax

puts

too

much

store? This is the

man,

after

all,

we

might

note with

respect

to

spatial

relations,

who

could not

endure,

as the

oracle

riddlingly

suggests

for his

salvation,

to

remain

inside

the tent

even for the

space of

one

single

day. But it

is

precisely

the

ambi-

guities

of this

hero who

in his

madness

has

not

acted

the

part

of

the

hero

and

precisely

the

question

of

dishonor

converted

finally

to honor

that

account

for

the

interesting

ambiguities

of

his

subsequent

actions,

which

rewrite

the

theatrical

conventions

associated with

gender.

Thus

the

deceptive

speech

makes

sense as

a

feminine

strategy

enlisted

in

the

service of

restoring

an

unequivocal

manliness

that

he

can

only

achieve,

as

I

suggested

before,

by

dying

the

manly

death-

heroically

and

publicly

on

stage-yet

in

the

woman's

way.

Now when

other

male

characters,

those not

designated

as

tragic

figures

in

the

dramatic

action, seek to

deceive,

their

devices

flounder,

and men as

these

are

dismissed

out of

hand.36

Agamemnon,

so

easily

duped

by

his

wife in

Aeschylus'

Playing the

Other

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play,

miserably

fails,

for his

part,

when in

Euripides'

Iphigenia

in Aulis

he

and

Menelaus

plot

to bring

Iphigenia

as

a sacrifice

for

the expedition

to Troy

under

the

pretext

of a marriage

with Achilles.

Clytemnestra

finds

them

out-by

a for-

tuitous

accident-and

the sacrifice

only takes

place

through

Iphigenia's

voluntary

and open

choice of

the role

assigned

to her

by

her father

and

the myth.

Most

telling

of all

perhaps,

Odysseus,

the master

plotter

on his own

epic

territory

(and

a familiar

trickster figure

in

the

plots

of

mischievous

satyr

plays),

only sees

his

plans

go awry

on the tragic

stage-for

example,

in Sophocles'

Philoctetes

when

Neoptolemus,

son

of

Achilles, rejects

finally

the

man and

his plans,

he of

whom

his

father

had said

in the Iliad,

"I

hate like

the gates

of Hades

a

man who

hides

one

thing in

his heart

and

speaks

another"

(9.312-13).

The Bacchae

finally,

as

we might

expect,

furnishes

the

most remarkable

exam-

ple

of

the uses

of

plotting

and exposes

the conventions

of

its theatrical

deploy-

ment

as

the pivotal

point

around which

the entire play

revolves

and

the peripeteia

depends.

All the

operative

terms come into

play-secrecy,

guilefulness,

entrap-

ment,

and femininity-as

Dionysus

and Pentheus

engage

in their

power struggle

for control over

the

other,

the

city,

the

women,

and ultimately, over

the

outcome

of

the plot

itself.

Pentheus aligns

himself,

of course,

with physical

force

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

retaliate

against

threats

of

force at

this critical

moment with

a devious

plot-to

entice

Pentheus

to

go

alone

to

the mountains

in

secrecy.

What

this

means

is that he

persuades

Pentheus

to trade his

ready

reliance

on

physical

combat

for

that

other,

diametrically opposite

mode

of action-resort

to a

cunning plot

of

self-concealment.

In other

words,

Dionysus'

strategy

for

victory

over

his

opponent

is first

to lure him into

embracing

the same kind

of

strategy.

They

are

co-conspirators

now, plotting

together

but for

ultimately

diver-

gent

results,

as

for one

the

intrigue

will

succeed

in

every respect

and

for the

other

it will

disastrously

fail.

But the

first conquest

of Pentheus

already

lies

in the

fact that he

agrees

to

shift

his tactics

from

open

force to the

secret

deception

of

hiding,

and the

second,

which

follows

upon

the

first,

is the

change

in

dress

from male

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

plot-

ting,

the

very charges

Pentheus

has laid

against

both

Dionysus

and the maenads

(e.g.,

475,

487,

805-6),

and

the costume Pentheus

dons

therefore

matches and

visually represents

the feminine

nature

of

the

strategy

he

has

already

chosen.

But

in

the

ways

of women

Pentheus

is

only

an

imposter,

easily

betrayed

by

the

other

superior

plotter,

and hence

the scheme

he contrives

and carries

out

can

only

recoil

against

him for

his own

doom.

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Mimesis

I come now

very briefly

to

my

fourth and most inclusive

element-

that of

mimesis itself,

the art of

imitation through

which

characters

are ren-

dered lifelike

and plot

and action offer

an

adequate

representation

of

reality.

Yet

mimesis

also focuses

attention

on

the status of

theater as

illusion, disguise,

double dealing,

and pretense.

There

is

a

serious

and wonderful

paradox

here.

For while

theater resorts

continually

to artifice,

as

it

must,

to

techniques

of

make-believe

that 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

conflicts of

a

complex

existence.

Role

playing

is

what actors

must

literally

do

in the theater

as

they

don their

costumes

and masks

to

impersonate

an

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, offering

only

a

persona (a

prosopon)

to

the other

that does not match what lies behind the

mask.

Recognition, anagnorisis

of persons

whose

identities were

unknown

or

mis-

taken is,

of course, a typical

and even

focal device of tragic

action.

But this kind

of

recognition

is the

overtly

theatrical

event

that

condenses

the

epistemological

bias

of

the entire phenomenon

of drama.

Thus

recognition

extends

along

a far

wider spectrum,

embracing

the world,

the other, and

the self.

The

problem

of

accurately

reading

the other is a

continuing,

obsessive concern

in

Greek

tragedy

that increases

in urgency

as the genre

displays a

greater self-consciousness

with

regard

to its own theatrical

resources.

But recognition

of

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

psychologically

significant result

on

the

tragic

stage, suggesting

what the

invention of

theater for and

in the city

might

imply

about an

emerging

image

of the private

individual

and the growing

pains

of masculine

identity.37

This double dimension of role playing is a feature

that Greek society would

perceive

as not

exclusively

but

yet

fundamentally

feminine.38 Woman is

the

mimetic

creature par excellence,

ever since

Hesiod's Zeus

created her as

an imitation

with

the aid of

the other artisan

gods and

adorned

her with a deceptive

allure.39

Woman is

perennially

under

suspicion

as the one

who

acts a

part-that

of

the

virtuous wife-but

hides

other thoughts

and

feelings, dangerous

to

men,

within

herself

and the house.

"Counterfeit

evil"

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 say one thing

and

hide another

in

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

Playing

the

Other 79

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Woman speaks on the tragic

stage, transgressing the social rules if she

speaks

on her own behalf. In this role,

her speech and action involve her in the

ensemble

of tragic experience and thereby

earn her the right to tragic suffering.

But by

virtue of the conflicts generated

by her social position and ambiguously

defined

between inside and outside,

interior self and exterior identity, the

woman is

already more of a "character"

than the man, who is far more limited as

an actor

to his public social and political

roles. Woman comes equipped with a

"natural"

awareness

of

those very complexities

men would resist, if they could. Situated

in

her more restrictive and sedentary

position in the world, she is permitted,

she is

asked, we might say, to reflect

more deeply, like Phaedra, on the paradoxes

of

herself. Through these she can

arrive better at the paradoxes of the

world that

she,

much

better

than

men,

seems to know is subject to irreconcilable

conflict,

subject as well to time, flux,

and change (the very themes I might add

of Ajax's

great deceptive speech). Hence

the final 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.

Woman

may

be

thought

to

speak double,

and

sometimes she does.

But she

also sees double; the culture

has taught her that too, and it is perhaps

not an

accident that

only

when Pentheus dresses as

a woman

does he see

double for the

first

time-two suns,

two Thebes. This

is

a symptom

of

madness,

to be

sure,

attributed

by

the

ancient

commentators

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

entering

into the

theatrical

illusion. The very

fact of that

dressing up already

demonstrates

the

premise

in

unequivocal

and

theatrical

terms.

The feminine

is a

tragic

figure

on the

stage;

she is also

the mistress

of

mimesis,

the heart and soul

of the theater.

The feminine

instructs

the other

through

her

own

example-that is,

in

her

own name

and under

her own

experience-but

also

through

her

ability

to

teach

the other

to

impersonate

her-whether

Pentheus

or

Dionysus.

This

brief discussion

can

suggest only

in

outline

how

closely

the

tragic genre

in

its theatrical

form, representation,

and content is

linked to Greek notions

of

gender,

and how

for the most

part

man is

undone

(or

at times

redeemed) by

feminine forces or

himself

undergoes

some

species

of

"feminine"

experience.

On the

simplest level,

this

experience

involves a shift

at the crucial

moment of

the

peripeteia

from active to

passive,

from

mastery

over the self

and others

to

surrender. Sometimes

there is

madness, always suffering

and

pathos,

which

lead

in

turn to

expressions

of lamentation

and

pity

from the chorus

and/or the char-

acters. In a

more

complex

view, tragedy,

understood

as the

worship

of

Dionysus,

80

REPRESENTATIONS

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expands an awareness

of

the

world and

the self

through

the drama

of

"playing

the other" whose mythic

and cultic

affinities

with

the

god logically

connects

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 complexity of the new

situation,

it

also,

as

Linda Bamber

remarks, "does not dismiss them"

but

rather most

often shows

that manliness

and self-assertion

need

no longer

compete

with

pity

and even

forgiveness.4'

Moreover,

the male characters whose sufferings

are

the most

stringent

and reduc-

tive of self are also allowed to discover

the internal strength

for

transcending

them.42 In the end, tragedy arrives at closures

that generally

reassert

male,

often

paternal, structures

of

authority,

but before

that the work of

the drama is to

open up the masculine

view

of

the universe.

It

typically

does

so,

as

we have

seen,

through energizing the theatrical

resources of the female and concomitantly

enervating

the

male

as the

price

of initiating

actor and

spectator

into new and

unsettling

modes of

feeling, seeing,

and

knowing.

We

can trace the

persistence

of

this

"initiatory" process

from the work of

the

first tragic poet to the third.43 History

has cunningly arranged

it that

Euripides'

last play, the Bacchae, should

also

refer

back

to

the

archaic scenario

that underlies

the ritual conditions of the theater.44 Yet

viewed

in its

metatheatrical aspects,

the

Bacchae also makes claims to be considered

in a diachronic

perspective

as a belated

examplar

of the

genre

that

by

now has

developed

a

keen awareness of

its own

properties and conventions. As a result,

the play is in a position to exemplify

and

reflect back what was always implicit in the

theater, and at the same time, by the

very admission of that theatrical awareness,

to transform

its

object

of

reflection

and reorient

it

in

new and different directions.

If

my basic hypothesis

is

valid, then

the

distinctive features of Euripidean

theater (which are more obvious, in fact,

in plays other than the Bacchae) may

well lend support to

what

I have been suggesting

about the intimate relations

between the

feminine

and the

theater.

Thus

I

see all the

following traits of Eurip-

idean drama as various and interlocking

functions of one another, starting with

Euripides' greater interest

in and skill at subtly portraying the psychology of

female

characters,

and

continuing

to his

general emphasis

on interior

states of

mind

as well

as on the

private emotional

life of the individual, most often located

in

the feminine

situation. We may add to

these his particular fondness for plots

of

complex intrigue (usually suggested

by women) that use dolos, apatp,

technp,

and

mechane,

which

with

their resort to

disguise

and role

playing

are an

explicit

sign

of

an

enhanced

theatricality. Finally,

we may include

more

generally Eurip-

ides' thematic concern

with

metaphysical

questions of reality and illusion in

the world.

The Helen is the

most

splendid

example,

as it

is

a

drama

that

allows itself the

fullest play

with the

resources

of theater and

uses these

to direct the

most elab-

Playing

the Other 81

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orate

inquiry

into

the complexities

of being

and

seeming

and

the

paradoxical

crossings

of

illusion

and

reality.45

The source

of the

confusion

is the

ontological

status

of the feminine

itself.

There are

two

Helens,

the

real,

chaste

version

who

was left

in

Egypt

and

never

went

to Troy,

and

the

more traditional

adulterous

wife whom

Menelaus

thinks

he has

recovered

at

Troy

but is

really

a phantom,

an eidolon,

impersonating

Helen's

true self.

I alluded

earlier

to

the symbolic

impli-

cations

we

might

infer from

Pentheus

dressing

as

a woman

and

seeing

double

for the first

time.

Here

in the

Helen, where

double

vision rules

the

play

in

every

respect,

the

woman

is

both a

character

who

to her

irremediable

sorrow

learns

first

hand

about

the

most

fundamental

problems

of

the

self's

identity

and,

at

the

same

time,

serves

as an objective

referent

through

which

the

man

must

question

all his previous

perceptions

of the world.

What

is

more,

the essential

strategy

for

insuring

the success

of

the

intrigue

she

invents

for

their

rescue

requires

that

he

too

adopt

a disguise

and

pretend

to be

another

than

himself,

allowing

her

to

recount

the

most

dangerous

fiction

that the

real

Menelaus

has

died.

The

uses

of

the play,

to be

sure,

have

their deadly

serious

side

for

all con-

cerned,

and the unhappy

residue

of

spoiled

lives persists

behind

the successful

outcome

of the

play.

But for love of

this

woman,

whether

in

her

imagined

or

real

persona,

the man

willingly

enters

into the

theatrical game

and shows

a capacity

now

to act a

part

and

enter

into a

stage

illusion. The

Helen is

a rare play

that

pushes

its

original

improbable

(and

theatrical)

premises

as far

as

they

can

go,

but

the uxorious

Menelaus

is also a

novelty,

and the

erotic

element already

diverts

the

play

away

from the

more typical

tragic

mode

to that of

romance.

In

this new

kind of

play

world

Euripides

invents,

the uses

to which he

puts

the feminine

and

the theater

may

be

seen as

the

logical

result

of the

premises

of

tragedy.

On

the

other

hand,

by

disclosing

those

premises

too

well,

he also

alters them

and

sub-

verts

the

genre

that

was so

firmly

bound

up

with

the

context

of the

masculine

civic world.

Thus,

in

this sense,

Euripides

may

be said

to have

"feminized"

tragedy

and,

like his

Dionysus

in the Bacchae,

to

have laid

himself

open

to the scorn

that

accrues

to those

men

who

consort

with women.

Aristophanic

comedy,

which loves to

lampoon

Euripides

and all his

newfangled

ideas,

continually

presses

the scandal

of his erotic dramas,

especially

those

that let

women

speak

more

boldly (and

hence more

shamefully)

upon

the

stage

until

Aristophanes,

in

his

own late

play,

the

Frogs,

evaluates

on

a full-fledged

scale

the development

of the

tragic

genre

by

staging

an

open

contest

between

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

underworld

to the

city

and theater

of

Athens. Which

one

is more

worthy

to save

the

city,

which seems

to

link its loss

of

political

potency

to the

absence

of a

fertile,

potent

poet

in

the

tragic

theater?

Broadly

stated,

the contest

develops

into

one

between

masculine

and

feminine

sides,

with

Aeschylus

espousing

a

manly,

virile

82

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art that

exhorts its

citizens

to

military

valor

and

Euripides representing

a

femi-

nine, slender Muse

who

is weaker and more

insubstantial, leaning

toward

the

sensual and

the

pathetic.

Not

surprisingly,

when

these two are tested

in

the

scales,

Aeschylean tragedy outweighs

the

Euripidean by

its

superior

mass and

weight.

Dionysus therefore abandons his original desire for Euripides,

to whose seductive

allure he

had

earlier

succumbed,

in favor of

resurrecting

the

heroic

warrior

energies of

the earlier

poet and, by extension,

of the

past.46 Aristophanes

not

untypically assumes

that when

things go badly

for men and masculine

interests

the cause lies in a decay of moral and aesthetic

values that slides

easily

into hints

of

effeminacy

and all

that that

implies.

In

any case,

the solution

of

the

Frogs

in

bringing

back

the

archaic

spirit

of

Aeschylus as a solution to the city's problems is also

a

formal, generic

one.

It

is

predicated on the controlling convention of Old Comedy that fulfills its festive

function of social renewal by consistently choosing

the

idealized past

over the

distressing,

chaotic

present,

even as

it

prefers

to

rejuvenate

the old

(father)

rather

than, as in New Comedy, to promote

the

young (son). Moreover,

the comic

poet

paints

with a

broad,

satirical

brush,

and whatever the

justice

or

truth of the cause

he thinks he

is

advancing (and

his

play,

of

course,

is

what

he

imagines

will save

the city), he

has

the generic right

to

misrepresent,

and

how he

does

it

here affects

Aeschylus even

more

perhaps

than

Euripides.

Leaving

aside

the fact that

Euripides

too has his

military

and

patriotic plays,

Aristophanes

would have us believe

that

the essence

of

the Seven

Against Thebes,

that drama

"full

of

Ares"

invoked to

support Aeschylus' case,

was some conven-

tional

treatment

of

military prowess.

It

was

rather

a

tragedy concerning

the

sons

of

Oedipus

and

the

dangers they posed

to the

safety

of

the

city by

their

resort

to

armed combat

in the

style

of the old heroic

duel,

while

the

function of

the avenging Erinys returning to

fulfill

the father's curse conforms precisely,

even schematically, to the rules of the feminine

in

the theater as I have earlier out-

lined them.

Nevertheless, Aristophanes

is a witness we

cannot afford to

ignore.

He

speaks

about the

theater from

within

the theater. Skewed as his caricature of Euripides

(and

his

drama) may be,

his

strategy

of

clustering the poet's theatrical, psycho-

logical, and noetic innovations around a particular affinity for the feminine is

valuable

testimony to

a

popular contemporary perception of Euripidean theater,

even

if it

is

bought

at the

price

of

suppressing the continuities

with

earlier drama.

Along the

same

lines, we may even be able to swallow Aristophanes' parting

shot that

implies Euripides' loss of the tragic art is due to "sitting at the feet of

Socrates"

(1491-95),

another favorite

target for comic misrepresentation. Yet

however justified Aristophanic comedy may be to single out both Euripides and

Socrates

as

spokesmen

for the new intellectual

trends that

confuse

and

unsettle

the

older, simpler (hence more manly) values of the city, philosophy would never

consort

with

tragedy, which

it

comes to see as its implacable rival in laying claim

Playing

the Other

83

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to teach

the truth, impart

knowledge, improve

its fellow citizens,

and without

doubt-to

save the city.

Socrates,

as Plato

in the

next generation

has

him

argue, makes

no distinction

whatsoever

among any of

the tragic poets

when he comes to discuss

the theatrical

arts. Indeed, he founds

his

critique

of drama on Homer, whom

he characterizes

as the first teacher

and

guide

of

tragedy.47

That

same Aeschylean

play is invoked

again

when Socrates'

interlocutor in the

Republic

first

quotes

a famous verse from

it

in a

proper

context only

at

the next moment

to

turn

around the meaning of

the lines

that follow

it

so

as to apply

it

to the

unjust

man

rather

than to the

just.48

The argument

in Plato between

tragedy

and philosophy is well

known, and it is

not

my intention to

air all the old questions

or

to solve

the old dilemmas. But I

want

to suggest

that Plato, standing outside

the

drama,

can be called

in as

a last

witness

to support my

claims about

the intrinsic

links

between femininity

and

theater,

viewed now

from a wholly negative

perspective.

Plato's insistence

on

banishing tragedy

from

his

ideal state

and his consistent distaste

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

explicitly

philosophical

issues,

I want to

argue

that

Plato's

position

on theater can also

be illuminated

by considering

its

relation to his

notions

of

gender

and his

attitudes toward

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

forever

change

the

shape

of

Western

thought. But,

like

Aristophanes,

Plato is

concerned

with

restoring

men

and their morals

in the

city, and,

like

the comic

poet,

he insists

on

the

relevance

of

aesthetic style

and

form.

Briefly put,

for the

purposes

of

this

discussion,

Plato's

larger

concerns

may

also

be translated

into his

general

desire to remake man in

a masculine

society

and

through philosophical

training

to

purify

and

enhance

the traditional

heroic notion

of manliness

(andreza)

in

a

new,

revised version

in

which

courage, vigilance,

and

strength may

be

better

utilized

for the

improve-

ment of self and

society.

Certainly,

Plato

comes closest

to

codifying

under the name of

philosophy

the

dream of the Greek

male

for a world that is constituted

as

his

alone,

where he

might

give

birth to himself and aspire

finally

to

an

immortality he

has

always

craved.

In

tragedy,

this desire leads

to

disaster,

most

often,

as we have

seen,

through

the resistance

of the

gods-and

of

the

women. Philosophy,

on the

other

hand,

offers the

promise

of success

in this

endeavor, providing

one follows the

blueprints

that are

carefully designed

to retrain the masculine self.

It

may

be

objected

that Plato breaks

with

the

old

stereotypes

of

gender

when

he

insists

that women

may

be

just

like

men with the

exception

of a natural

infe-

riority

in

physical strength,

which

does

not

disqualify

them from

participating

as

guardians

(and

even

warriors)

in his vision of the ideal

city

in

the

Republic.

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This is

a revolutionary

proposal

whose

significance

we ought

not

minimize.50

But we

should

note

that

this reevaluation

of

women

does

not really upgrade

the

feminine

in its

differences

from

the

masculine.

Quite

the

contrary-Plato

defuses

the power

and

specificity

of the

feminine

when he

would

abolish

the family

and

the domestic

sphere

in which

that

influence

operated.

If he

includes

the

partic-

ipation

of certain

women

who

may

prove

to possess

masculine

abilities,

it

is

precisely

because

in

the Republic

he believes

that

they

may be

successfully

taught

to

imitate

the

masculine

model.

Even

here,

the principle

of equality

falters

when

Plato

would reward

with special

breeding

privileges

men

who

have

distinguished

themselves

in

battle

but does

not

suggest

granting

the same

opportunities

to

their

female counterparts.

This may or

may

not be

a

trivial slip.

What is

striking,

however,

is that

elsewhere

femininity

plays

for Plato

throughout

his work

its usual

role

of

negative

foil

to the

masculine

as

it heads

the

long

list of

undesirable

models

for men that

descends

to

the servile,

the buffoonish,

the

bestial,

and the

non-

human

(Republic

3.395d-396b).

Plato's

attack

on

tragedy

and

its

traditional repertory

operates

on

several

fronts:

he

objects

to the

deceptiveness

of theatricality

as a

misleading

and

defi-

cient imitation

of reality,

deplores

the often

unworthy

quality

of what or who

is

being

imitated,

and insists

upon

the

damaging

effects

such imitations are

liable

to produce

on the

actors and

spectators

in the

theater.5'

For the

first

case,

I would

not

go

so

far as to claim

that Plato

explicitly

refers

the art

of making

illusions

to the

feminine

per

se,

even

if

women,

like

children,

are

most

susceptible

to its

charms

(e.g.,

Laws

658d,

817c)

and most

likely,

in

fact,

to

tell

those lying

stories

about the

gods

to their

young

(Republic

377c).

But

Plato's

interest

never

focuses

for

long

on women

as

such

but

rather

on the

inferior

type

of

man,

who deceptively

passes

off

appearances

for

truth

and who

appeals

to

the inferior

parts

of

the

self (and

the citizenry)

that

will yield

to

the emotions

and

pleasures

(not

lessons)

of

make-believe.

Thus, although

he

confirms

the

conventional

dictum

that

woman

is inclined

by

nature

to be

secretive

(lathraio-

teron)

and crafty (epiklopoteron)

because

of her

intrinsic

weakness

(to asthenes)-and

concomitantly,

her

natural

potential

for

virtue

is inferior

to a

man's

(Laws

781

a-b)-Plato

hardly

sees

her

(or her

representation)

as a powerful

acting

force

in

the world of

men.52

But

by

a whole series

of innuendos

and

juxtapositions, poets

(and

artists)

are

enrolled in the

ranks of male

trickster

figures

who fall

furthest from

the ideal

of

manliness and

seek

only

to

cajole,

seduce,

and pander

to

the tastes of

their audi-

ence.

Imitators

(artists

and

musicians)

and

poets

and

their

entourage

of

actors,

dancers,

and

producers

join

the multitude

of

callings

that

are

signs

of

the

luxury

that

corrupts

the

primitive

city,

and

these directly precede

those

"makers of

all

sorts of

goods,

especially

those

that have

to do with women's

adornment";

the

sequence

then continues

with those

servants

like

"beauty-shop

ladies,

barbers,

cooks,

and confectioners"

(Republic

373b-c).

Playing

the

Other

85

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Once assimilated

to

the

larger category

of sophists,

dramatic art,

reduced

finally to prose

rhetoric on a

par with oratory,

shares in

the same field

of ref-

erence that likens

their

false imitations of justice

to those

activities practiced

by

and for women:

cookery (especially

confectionery),

which

"puts on the

mask of

medicine and pretends

to know

what foods are

best for the

body"

(Gorgias

464c-d),

and beauty-culture,

"the counterfeit

to physical training

...

a mischievous,

swind-

dling, base, servile

trade,

which creates

an

illusion by the

use of artificial

adjuncts

and make-up and

depilatories

and costume"

(Gorgias 465b-c).

All these arts

traffic

in

deceptive appearances,

and their effect on others is

to pander

to appetites

and pleasurable

gratification.

The Gorgias

stresses a certain

sensual, effeminate

pleasure.

But the

Republic,

in

which Plato

specifically

addresses

the

emotional

power

of the tragic,

empha-

sizes the

experience

of

pain

and

suffering,

and

evaluates

its

effects

on those who

act

in

and attend

the tragic

spectacles.

Here the association

with

the

feminine is

clear and explicit,

reiterated

each time Plato

returns to the

topic: when

heroes

are shown

to weep

and lament their misfortunes, they are

not only endorsing

a

false theology

about the justice

of the gods

but are weakening

themselves

and

others

by

their indulgence

in

womanish

grief

(Republic

387e-388a,

605d-e).

Such

a man does not remain

steadfast to himself, exercising

self-control

and

rationally pondering

the events that 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

that

the

state (and

the soul)

requires.

Worst of

all,

he entices

the

spectators

into the

pleasures

of

vicariously

identifying

with his pitiable

state,

and ends

by setting

them

the

example they

unfortunately

will learn to imitate

for themselves.53

For Plato,

who so often

strives to efface

or remove

all

mixture,

confusion,

and

changeability,

his

theory

of drama is

simple

because,

stripped

down

to

essences,

his categories

are also

simple.

The

mobility

of

temporary

reversals

and dialectical

play

with

opposites

already

introduces

a

cognitive

complexity

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 reinforce

a

simple

stability.

At the

most inclusive

level

is

the dictum that

no

man

can

play

more than

one

part,

in life

or

in

the theater

(e.g., Republic

3.394e-395b).

The other

is

always

weaker

and inferior to the

self,

whose

idealization

requires

that,

once

perfectly

established,

it cannot

change

and still be itself.

As

such,

that

lack of strength

(attributable

to

the

lack of

mastery by

the rational

faculty

and

hence equatable

finally

to

a lack of

wisdom)

can

be most

easily

codified

according

to the conventional

terms

of

the

society

under the

name

of

the

feminine

other,

to include

the

cognate negative

traits

of

cowardice,

fearfulness,

and emotional

lability. Hence,

in Plato's

reductive view

of drama and

of

gender, playing

the

other

is

a

species

of

wrongful

imitation

that threatens to

infect

reality

and

degrade

the

aspiring,

virile self.

It is therefore

forbidden,

above

all,

"for

a

man, being

a

86

REPRESENTATIONS

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man-in training,

in fact to become

a good/brave man,"

to imitate a

woman

in

any way whatsoever:

"whether old

or young, whether

railing against

her husband,

or boasting of a

happiness which

she imagines can

rival the

gods,

or

overwhelmed

with grief and

misfortune; much

less a woman

in

love,

or

sick,

or

in labor"

(Republic 3.395d-e).

Men

are neither permitted

to

impersonate

a woman

nor to

show

themselves

in a male

persona

as

undergoing

the

experiences

of a

woman,

precisely the routes

I have proposed

as leading to masculine

initiation

into the

lessons (and benefits)

of the tragic

world.

Limited as

his discussion of theater

may be, Plato,

as

a

spectator

who fails

to

come

under the

spell of tragic

mimesis

(or

who

perhaps

once did

and

was

cured),

nonetheless darkly

confirms the

inextricable

relationship between

theater and

the feminine. Tragedy

cannot control the

ambiguities

of

role

playing,

as most

particularly

when the male actor is

called upon

to

represent

the

woman who is

not under control

either because she

is actively unruly

or because she

succumbs

to

the

pressures

of her

body.

More

generally, tragedy

by

its

very

nature

and

intention

can make

no

solid

provision

for

controlling

the

ambiguities

of a world

view

that

theater is expressly designed

to

represent.

Thus

Plato,

from his

point

of

view,

is

entitled

to

deny

to "the solemn

and marvelous

poiesis

of

tragedy"

the

very task we

might agree

it is well

equipped

to

accomplish,

namely

that

of

impart-

ing "beneficial

if

unpleasing

truths,"

and to claim instead that it

gives

its

uncritical

and

vulgar

audience

what it desires

to see and hear

(Gorgias

502b).

Plato goes still

further

into the matter

of

gender

and

drama in

the

playful

contest

he

stages

between

theater

and

philosophy

in the

Symposium,

where the

party to

celebrate the

recent victory of the tragic poet,

Agathon,

at

the

City

Dionysia ends

with the crowning

of Socrates instead of

Agathon.

In mounting

his own rival drama to explore the

subject

of

eros,

Plato excludes the presence

of the feminine at the

banquet

but subtly

and

significantly

uses the categories

of

effeminacy

and

femininity

to

enhance

the

philosophical

position

that

is

meant

to

include

and

supersede

the

appeal

of the theater.

The

Symposium

is one of Plato's

most

artful and

complex

dialogues and deserves,

of

course,

much

fuller

discussion.54

It

is established early on that love

of

women

is

an

inferior sort 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-

resentative of

all tragic art. Agathon

speaks last, just before

Socrates, and in

his

flowery speech

on

eros,

which

parodies

perhaps

the

very

play

that

earned

him

the

tragic

victory (anthos

=

flower),

he

demonstrates

the soft and effeminate

nature for which he was

known and which

Aristophanes

wickedly lampoons

in

his

comedies (e.g.,

Thesmophoriazousae).55

Although Aristophanes

in the Sympo-

sium

is made at the end to fall

asleep

before Agathon, thus

establishing his rank

in

the hierarchy

that leads from comedy to tragedy and

then to philosophy,

the

comic

poet

is

represented

as

a

far

more

robust character

than the tragic

poet,

and his contribution

to

the theme of eros is more memorable

and more substan-

Playing

the Other 87

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tial.56

The contrast, to

be sure, is even

more striking

between the lovelorn

Aga-

thon

and Socrates,

whose physical

endurance and

resistance to pederastic

temp-

tation

attest to the

remarkable

self-control of this

soldier/philosopher/lover/hero.

On the other

side, however,

philosophy appropriates

for its own use

the one

kind of feminine

authority that the

culture

acknowledges as legitimate

when

Socrates names the

prophetic

priestess, Diotima, as the

source of his

initiation

long ago into the

sacred mysteries of

Eros and as the

original author

of the

inspiring discourse on

eros he now is

about to deliver.

The feminine retains

here

her

more instinctive

alliance with the

erotic as well as her

mysterious

connection

with

that other world and

its secrets

whose power we

have come to

recognize

when manifested in

the theater. And

the woman, armed

with the prestige of

her

sacred

vocation, is called

upon

to

instruct

men as to how

they might

transcend

feminine influence

and, through

the

sublimations of

pederastic love,

even

give

birth

to themselves.

In

Plato's counter-drama the female as benevolent

priestess

has no

cause

of

her

own to protect

and

no conflictual

interests

to

distract

her.

She is then free to

lend whole-hearted

support to the

cause

of

men and to

transmit to them

a

wisdom

without

tragic pain

that

may become

entirely

theirs.

She

imparts

a

myth about

the

genealogy

of Eros

that

makes the erotic

principle

a

male child

and

explains

his nature

by

assigning potency

and

presence

to his

father,

Poros

(Ways

and

Means),

and a

famished

emptiness

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

theater

as

well as

the

feminine,

Plato's

drama

puts

the former

to

sleep

in the

presence

of

the

wakeful

philosopher

and

transfers

feminine

orac-

ular

power

to

Socrates-the

midwife-who

also

incorporates

the

Dionysiac

into

his

satyr-like image

of

Silenus.

In

the

process

Plato obviates the

tragic

necessity

that

requires

the

feminine

presence upon

the

stage

and whose

complicated

and

essential functions

in the

theater

of

Dionysus

we have followed

throughout

the

course

of

this

essay.

Notes

An earlier, reduced version

of

this

paper

was

presented

at a

conference,

"After The

Second Sex,"

held at the

University

of

Pennsylvania, and at a symposium honoring

Professor Helen Bacon at Barnard College in New York, both in April 1984.

I

wish

to thank the commentators

on

these two occasions, Carolyn Heilbrun and Marylin

Arthur, respectively, as well as others who participated in the discussion. Thanks also

to

the

members

of

the Women's Studies

Colloquium

at Princeton

University,

who

offered

acute and thoughtful

comments at the

presentation

of this

paper,

in

partic-

88

REPRESENTATIONS

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ular, Natalie Davis,

Suzanne Keller, and Elaine Showalter. Finally, I am grateful to

Jack Winkler,

Simon

Goldhill,

and

Jean-Pierre Vernant,

who read the

manuscript

and

from whose incisive and

valuable criticism

I

have greatly profited.

1. E.g., Bacchae 451-59;

Dionysus

is

called thelymorphos,

351

(cf. Pentheus' description

as gynaikomorphos [his costume

as imitating

a

woman's, gynaikomimoi; 981]).

2.

For the fullest account

of this

hypothesis,

see Richard

Seaford, "Dionysiac

Drama

and

Dionysiac

Mysteries,"

Classical Quarterly 31 (1981): 252-75.

3. For the metatheatrical

aspects of this scene

in

particular (and the play as a whole),

see Helene Foley, "The

Masque of

Dionysus,"

Transactions of

the

American Philological

Association 110 (1981):

107-33; and Charles Segal, DionysiacPoetics

and

Euripides'Bac-

chae (Princeton, 1982), 215-71.

4. See

further

E

I.

Zeitlin,

"Travesties

of

Gender and Genre

in

Aristophanes'

Thesmo-

phoriazousae,"

in

Reflections

of

Women in

Antiquity

ed. Helene

P.

Foley (New

York

and

London, 1981), 169-217

(a shorter

version

appears

in

CriticalInquiry

8

[1981]: 301-28,

and

is

collected

in

Writing

and

Difference,

ed.

E.

Abel

[Chicago, 1982], 131-58).

5. It should be noted that,

unlike other public Dionysiac festivals

in

Attica (and else-

where)

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

preliminary

procession).

6.

The question

I

raise here

about

the

development

of

drama

in

Athens

and

its

political

and social motivations

is

obviously

too

complex

for this limited discussion.

I

would

suggest merely that the

historical conditions

of

drama, interestingly enough,

coincide

with

a period

that

sharply polarizes

definitions

and

distinctions of masculine

and

feminine roles.

Drama,

like the

woman,

we

might say,

is

useful

for its

society,

and

at

the

same

time

potentially

subversive and destructive.

It is

also

worth

remarking

that

as

theater reaches

its

full

flowering

in

the fifth

century,

the

iconography

of

Dionysus

undergoes a shift

in

the vase

paintings from a masculine, bearded figure to one,

more

youthful, who displays

effeminate and

more

androgynous features.

7.

For the bisexual

consciousness of Dionysus, see especially James Hillman, The Myth

of Analysis (Evanston, Ill.,

1972), 258-66.

For

the more

general paradoxes

of Dio-

nysus' role, see the

synthesis of Segal, Dionysiac Poetics, 10-19.

8.

These festivals are occasions for riotous

carnival (e.g., the Cretan Ekdysia, the Argive

Hybristika). Dionysiac

merriment also lends itself to 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's

clothing

and

play

the woman"

(Imagines

1.2).

9. On

the various forms of transvestism

in

Greek

rite and myth, see Marie Delcourt,

Hermaphrodite: Myths

and

Rites

of

the Bisexual

Figure

in Classical

Antiquity, trans. J.

Nichol-

son

(London, 1956),

1-16; Clara Gallini,

"II

travestismo rituale di Penteo," Studi e

materiali

per

la

storia

delle

religioni

34

(1968): 211-18, esp. 215,

n.

6;

and Walter

Burkert,

Structure

and

History

in

Greek

Mythology

and

Ritual

(Berkeley, 1979),

29-30.

10. "For both sexes the initiation

through

which a

young

man

or

woman

is

confirmed

in

his

or her

specific

nature

may entail, through

a

ritual

exchange

of

clothing, temporary

participation

in

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

Myth

and

Society

in Ancient

Greece,

trans.

J. Lloyd [Sussex, 1980], 24). Cf. also Henri

Jeanmaire,

Couroi

et

Couretes

(Lille, 1939),

153,

321.

See

further Pierre Vidal-Naquet,

"The Black Hunter and the

Origin

of

the Athenian Ephebeia" and "Recipes for Greek

Playing

the

Other

89

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Adolescence,"

in R.

L. Gordon,

ed., Myth, Religion,

and Society

(Cambridge,

1981),

147-85.

I

borrow

his term, "law

of symmetrical

inversion."

11. The

best recent discussion

of the

question is

Helene

P.

Foley,

"The Conception

of

Women

in

Athenian Drama,"

in

Reflections of

Women in

Antiquity,

127-68,

who offers

a

judicious

and nuanced

analysis

that, however,

leans too far

perhaps in

seeking a

matched

symmetry

and reciprocity

between masculine

and feminine

roles.

12.

On

tragedy as initiation,

related both

to

the

mysteries

and

to

puberty rites,

see

the

discussion

of Seaford,

"Dionysiac

Drama" (drawing

upon the

early pioneering

work

of

George

Thomson, Aeschylus

and

Athens, 2nd

ed. [London,

1946]). For

aspects of

puberty

ritual

reflected

imaginatively

in

the various

dramas

see, for Aeschylus'

Ores-

teia,

Pierre Vidal-Naquet,

"Hunting

and Sacrifice

in Aeschylus' Oresteia,"

in Jean-

Pierre

Vernant and

Pierre Vidal-Naquet,

Tragedy

and Myth

in Ancient Greece,

trans. J.

Lloyd

(Sussex,

1981), 150, and F

I.

Zeitlin,

"The Dynamics

of Misogyny:

Myth and

Mythmaking

in

the

Oresteia," Arethusa

11

(1978):

149- 84 (now

in Women and

the Ancient

World: The

Arethusa

Papers,

ed.

John

Peradotto and J.

P.

Sullivan

[Albany,

1984]); for

Sophocles'

Philoctetes,

Pierre

Vidal-Naquet,

"Sophocles'

Philoctetes and the

Ephebeia,"

in

Tragedy

and Myth,

175-99; for

Euripides'

Hippolytus, see

especially Charles

Segal,

"Pentheus

and Hippolytus

on

the

Couch and

on the Grid: Psychoanalytic

and Struc-

turalist

Readings

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 Directions in

Euripidean

Criticism, ed.

Peter

Burian (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

relevant

to these speculations

is Louis Montrose,

"The

Purpose

of Playing:

Reflections

on a

Shakespearean

Anthropology,"

Helios [n.s.]

7.2 (1980):

51-74, who discusses

the

public

functions

of

Shakespearean

theater as a

secularized

means

of

confronting

the

transitions

of

life that had

earlier been

framed

in

the

milieu of Catholic ritual.

13.

I

am

indebted here

to

the

stimulating

discussion

of Linda

Bamber,

Comic

Women, Tragic

Men:

A

Study of

Gender

and

Genre

in

Shakespeare

(Stanford,

1982),

as much

for

its

provocative

arguments

as

for

its

use

in

confronting

some fundamental

differences

between

the

feminine

in

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 dialectic

of

self

and other

is

consistently

and

insistently

predicated

on

the

distinctions between

masculine and

feminine,

far

more even than

in

Shake-

speare.

Even the

plays

with

more

strictly

military

and

political

themes

(excepting

only

Sophocles'

Philoctetes) arrange

their

plots

around

critical confrontations

between

mas-

culine

and feminine.

14.

No Shakespearean

tragedy has a

woman as

its

main

character, although

sometimes

she

shares

double billing-Juliet,

Cleopatra. By

contrast,

in

extant Greek drama

women

often lend their

individual names

or

collective

functions

to the titles

(Antigone,

Elec-

tra,

Medea; Choephoroi,

Trachiniae, Bacchae,

etc.).

Moreover,

women

play

far

more

extensive

roles

in

Greek

tragedy,

which

increase

in

subtlety

and

variety

as

the

genre

develops.

15.

The functional argument

is even more

obviously

true

in

the case of those

plays

which

I

will

not

discuss

in this

essay,

in

which the

plot

revolves around the

demand made

upon

an

army

for a

virgin

sacrifice

(such

as

Iphigenia

and

Polyxena)

and

where female

heroic

nobility

in

dying

is

used

most often

to offer an

ironic

counterpoint

to

masculine

Realpolitik.

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16. See

especially

B. M. W

Knox,

"TheMedea of

Euripides:'

Yale Classical

Studies

25 (1977):

198-225,

for

the discussion

of Medea's "imitation"

of male heroic

traits.

17. It

should be

stressed that

I equate

drama

here with

serious drama

rather

than with

comic

types

such as satyr

play and

comedy

itself, whose

primitive

elements

may

well

have

preceded

the growth

of the strange

mutant

that

is

tragedy. For

even if

we renounce

any hopes

of reconstructing

a

plausible

story

of origins, there

seems no

doubt

that

the tragic play

is

the first to achieve

the status

of art and

that

the other

forms only

follow subsequently

in

its wake

and under

its influence.

To

speak

of

theater

then

is

to speak

first

of

tragedy.

18.

Y. Belaval,

"Ouverture

sur le

spectacle,"

in Histoire des

spectacles,

ed. R. Queneau

(Paris,

1965),

3-16, esp. 8.

19.

I

have profited

from the

discussion

in the unpublished

paper of

Nicole Loraux,

"Ways

of

Killing

Women

in

Greek

Tragedy,"

who

views Ajax'

suicide as

an unequivocal

war-

rior's death.

It is true,

of

course,

that the

sword is a man's weapon

and

that

if

women

resort

to it,

it is they who

are violating

the

rules of gender.

Yet it

is also true

that Ajax'

death, by

whatever

means and

in

whatever

mood,

is

still a

suicide,

an

act

the culture

regards

in

itself

as inherently

shameful

and

therefore

imagined

far more as

a feminine

solution.

20.

On the

general

question

of the

female body

as the

model of

male

suffering,

see

the

superb

study

of Nicole

Loraux,

"Le

Lit,

la

guerre,"

L'Homme

21

(1981):

36-67.

For

these

symptoms

in

the

Hippolytus,

see

respectively

Loraux,

"Le

Lit"'

58-59,

and

Charles

Segal,

"The

Tragedy

of the

Hippolytus:

The Waters

of

Ocean and the Untouched

Meadow,"

Harvard Studies

in Classical

Philology

70

(1965):

117-69, esp.

122.

21.

See the discussion

of this remarkable

passage

and its key function

in the play

in

Zeitlin,

"The Power

of

Aphrodite:'

68-74.

22.

On Pandora in

the

Hesiodic

text,

see

especially

the fine

analyses

by Jean-Pierre

Ver-

nant, "The

Myth

of Prometheus

in

Hesiod,"

in Myth

and Society,

168-85;

and Nicole

Loraux, "Sur

la race

des femmes

et quelques-unes

de ses tribus,"

Arethusa

11

(1978):

43-88 (collected

in

her Les Enfants

d'Athena: Idves

atheniennes

sur

la

citoyennet6

et la

division

des

sexes

[Paris,

1981], 75

-117).

23.

It is worth

noting

too that

the details of the sacrifice

of the

virgin's

body

holds

par-

ticular fascination

for the messenger

speeches

of the

relevant

tragedies.

24.

See further

Ruth

Padel,

"Women: Model

for Possession

by

Greek

Daemons,"

in

Images

of

Women in

Antiquity,

ed. Averil Cameron

and

Amelie

Kuhrt

(London,

1983),

3-19.

It is

remarkable

that

in

Euripides'

Heracles,

where

the great Heracles

goes

mad and

kills his

wife and

children,

the chorus

in

response

compares

him

only with

women:

the Danaids (who

slew their husbands

on their wedding night)

and

Procne (who slew

her

child in

revenge

for

her

husband's

rape and

mutilation of

her sister,

Philomela;

Heracles

1016-27).

25.

On

the uses

of

these

stage

conventions

and their

relations

of the

inside/outside,

see

especially

A. M.

Dale,

"Seen

and

Unseen

on the Greek

Stage:"

in

Collected Papers

(Cambridge,

1969),

119-29;

the

discussion

of Padel, "Women";

and

Zeitlin,

"The

Power

of

Aphrodite:'

74-79.

26.

The

locus classicus

is

Xenophon's

Qeconomicus.

The

best

discussion

is

Jean-Pierre

Ver-

nant,

"Hestia-Hermes:

Sur l'expression

religieuse

de

l'espace et

du mouvement

chez

les

Grecs,"

in

Mythe

et

pensee

chez

les Grecs (Paris,

1965),

6-27.

27.

See,

for

example,

the

incisive

remarks of

Jean-Pierre

Vernant,

"Tensions and Ambi-

guities

in

Greek

Tragedy,"

in

Vernant and

Vidal-Naquet,

Myth and

Tragedy,

6-27. This

Playing

the

Other

91

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epistemological emphasis

therefore both exploits and is conditioned by

the special

capacity of theater to

represent and embody the interaction between

other points of

view, attitudes, gestures, and

language.

28.

On

the

symbolic

value

of

the

house,

see

J. Wohlberg,

"The Palace-Hero

Equation

in

Euripides,"

Acta

Antiqua

Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 16 (1968): 149

-

55; and the

much fuller discussion

in

Segal, Dionysiac Poetics, 86-94 and passim.

29.

For fuller discussion of these terms and their relation to the

structures and

structuring

capacities of plots, see

Zeitlin,

"The Power

of

Aphrodite:" 58-64.

30.

Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Intimations

of

the

Will

in

Greek

Tragedy,"

in

Myth

and Society,

51.

His is

the most nuanced

discussion of this

double determination

that

is

often

misnamed as a conflict between

fate and

free will.

31.

For discussions

of

intrigue

plots

in

general, see especially Friedrich

Solmsen, "Zur

Gestaltung

des

Intriguenmotivs

in

den

Tragodien

des

Sophokles

und

Euripides,'

Philologus 84 (1932): 1-17; and Hans

Strohm, "Trug

und

Tauschung

in

der euripi-

deischen Dramatik,"

Wiirzburger Jahrbucher fur

die

Altertum-swissenschaft

4

(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

discussion

of

Frances

Muecke,

"'I

Know

You-By

Your

Rags':

Costume

and

Disguise

in

Fifth-Century Drama,"

Antichthon 16

(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 without some fancy

help from the

gods) so as to bring about

the

joyful

reunion. The

play,

I

might add,

is

careful not to

credit the woman Creusa as the

one who first initiates the intrigue.

33.

Euripides'

Electra is

still more

complex,

as

the play separates the two acts of

vengeance

against Clytemnestra

and her

lover, Aegisthus.

The old

servant

suggests the plot

against Aegisthus (to

take

place

outside far

away

from

the house), while

Electra

con-

trives

the

elaborate and

doubly

deceitful

intrigue against Clytemnestra.

34. This

is

a

commonplace

in

tragic

texts

(as elsewhere): e.g., Iphigenia

in

Tauris

1032;

Medea

834-35;

Andromache

85; Hippolytus 480-81;

Ion

483.

35.

Even

in

these

plays,

masculine

honor is

protected,

as it

were,

in

that

each man

(Orestes,

Menelaus)

first

proposes

force

before he accedes to the

woman's

practical,

clever

schemes

(Iphigenia, Helen),

and

each, just

before

the

end,

is

permitted a

display

of

manly strength against

the

forces

of

the

barbarian

king

in

question.

36.

The one

exception

that

comes to mind

is

Euripides' strange play,

Andromache,

where

Orestes,

not a

major

character, successfully plots

to have

Neoptolemus

killed

at

Delphi

so

as to reclaim

the

latter's

wife, Hermione,

for his

own.

37.

"The covert theme

of

all

drama:' Michael Goldman

suggests,

"is

identificaton,

the

establishment

of

a

self

that

in

some

way

transcends the

confusions

of

self";

The Actors

Freedom:

Toward

a

Theory of

Drama

(New York, 1975), 123.

In

general,

I

have

learned

much from this

stimulating

study

of

the

workings

of

theater.

38.

Odysseus

is

the

exemplar

in the

masculine

sphere,

but he neither

generically 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

tragedy

in

the

dramatic milieu.

39.

Earlier

I

alluded

to the creation

of

Pandora as

exemplifying

the

physical,

"creaturely"

side

of life.

I

emphasize

now the other

aspect

of

woman's

creation

as an

object

cun-

ningly wrought;

she

is

a

deceptive gift

in

return

for

Prometheus'

deception

of

Zeus,

herself endowed with a

crafty

intelligence.

Woman therefore embodies

both extremes

of

nature and

culture

that

together conspire

to waste

a man's substance and

dry

him

up

before

his

time.

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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 (with

one

small

alteration)

of

Bamber,

Comic

Women, Tragic Men,

15.

42. In this

respect,

there are

strong

continuities with the earlier

epic

tradition. See the

interesting conclusions of Helene

Monsacre's fine,

nuanced study,

Les Larmes

d'Achille:

Le

Heros,

la femme et la souffrance

dans la poesie

d'Homkre

(Paris,

1984), 199-204.

43. We might note that initiation

into the "real"

Eleusinian

mysteries

involved some

forms

of

imitating the specifically

feminine experiences

of

Demeter

and Kore.

44. More accurately, it is one

of the very last, produced posthumously

in

Athens as was

the

Iphigenia

in Aulis.

45. For the interplay of illusion

and reality, see Friedrich Solmsen,

"Onoma and Pragma

in

Euripides' Helen," Classical

Review 48 (1934): 119-21;

Ann

Pippin (Burnett), "Eurip-

ides' Helen:

A

Comedy

of Ideas," Classical Philology 55 (1960):

151-63; Charles Segal,

"The Two Worlds of Euripides'

Helen," Transactions of the

American Philological

Associ-

ation

102 (1971):

553-614; and see

now

George Walsh,

The Varieties

of

Enchantment:

Early Greek Views

on

the

Nature and Function of Poetry (Chapel

Hill, N.C., 1984),

96

-106.

On

the connections with

theater and femininity

in

the

context

of comic

parody,

see

Zeitlin, "Gender and

Genre," 186

-

89.

46.

I

simplify here the terms

of

the debate.

Both

sides

are

thoroughly

satirized

in

this

brilliant parody.

For

an

excellent discussion,

see

Walsh,

Varieties

of Enchantment,

80

-

97.

47.

See

especally Republic

595c, 598d,

605c-d,

607a,

602b.

48.

Republic 2.366a-b;

cf.

361b-c.

Strictly speaking,

the

Aeschylean quotes precede

the

discussion

of

the

mimetic

arts

in

book

3,

but their misuse

may

not

be fortuitous.

49.

I

include

in

the discussion

the relevant

portions

of

Republic,

Gorgias,

and

Laws,

to

be

followed by the Symposium.

50. This

issue deserves

far

more attention than space permits

here.

51.

Tragedy

is

the real

target,

despite

the

remarks about epic

poetry

and

comedy.

See

especially Laws 8 16d-e,

935d-

936b

for comedy, and 81 7a-d

for tragedy, where Plato

expressly sets up the legislators

as authors

of

their own true tragedies as "rivals

...

artists and actors

of

the

fairest

drama."

52.

One

single exception

is the woman

(wife

and

mother)

as

instigating

in her son

the

slide toward timocratic behavior

by her nagging and greed (Republic

549c-e). We will

take

up

the function

in

the

Symposium

of

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

protect

the

city. Courage

in

battle

is

the

model for

control over

warring

forces

within the self,

as

is

emphasized

in

the second discussion of

imitation

in book

10.

Cowardice

is the

radically

feminine

trait, despite Plato's

willingness

to

train selected

women

as guardians. (The

locus classicus

is

Timaeus

90e-91a,

in which

Plato

describes

the first creation

of

women

as

due to

"creatures

generated

as

men

who

proved

them-

selves cowardly and spent

their

lives in

wrongdoing and were

transformed at their

second

incarnation into

women.")

I

simplify Plato's intricate

argument, as he further

sees this lack

of

control

over the emotions, engendered by

tragedy, as leading to an

unruliness and violence he does not specify as feminine. Yet

the tyrannical man, the

most

"theatrical"

in

Plato's

view, whose exterior pomp and

costume does not at all

match

his

inner self (Republic

577b), is seen ultimately as a

slave to his passions who

becomes so

fearful that

he "lives for the

most part cowering

in

the house like a woman"

(Republic 579b-c).

Playing

the

Other

93

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54. In particular, the discussion would benefit from including

the important contribution

made by Alcibiades, the disruptive latecomer and

party crasher, but it would not in

any case substantially alter my argument.

55. In this comedy, which satirizes Euripidean tragedy

through the women's indignation

at the poet for his unflattering (and oversexed) portraits

of them, Agathon comes off

as the truly effeminate male by contrast to the trickster

but more manly figure

of

Euripides. Agathon appears

in

feminine accessories,

claiming that to write female

parts

for

the theater

one must

dress as a woman.

He

refuses

to

infiltrate

the women's

festival on the

grounds

that he would

provide

unfair competition

for

the "real" women,

and

finally supplies

the feminine costume for Euripides' kinsman,

who has been

persuaded to go

instead.

56.

Aristophanes presents the famous myth

of

the spherical

human beings who, separated

by Zeus

for

their hybris toward the gods, are

forever searching for reunion with their

other halves. These may

be of

the same

or

opposite

sex, depending on the original

composition of each.

94

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