Subject: BMCR 00.02.25, Ormand, Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy
From: owner-bmcr-l@brynmawr.edu
Date: Thu Feb 17 2000 - 19:52:05 EST
@@@@00.02.25, Ormand, Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy
Kirk Ormand. Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Pp. xi +219. $40.00 (hardcover);
19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-292-76051-5 (hardcover); 0-292-76052-3 (paper).
Reviewed by Deborah Lyons,
Johns Hopkins University
(dlyons@jhu.edu)
Word count: 1,930
Kirk Ormand has written the first full-scale exploration of marriage in
Sophocles, and, in so doing, joins the ever-growing ranks of those
examining the ideological context of marriage in Greek tragedy.[1] Until
now, most of these efforts have centered on Aeschylus and Euripides, and
while Ormand acknowledges significant debts to his predecesssors
(especially Wohl and Segal) in his treatment of the Trachiniai, his
comprehensive discussion of the marriage theme in Sophocles breaks new
ground. The book will most frequently be compared to those of Rabinowitz
(Anxiety Veiled) and Wohl (Intimate Commerce). Its single-author scope more
closely resembles the former, while its theoretical orientation has more in
common with the latter. The treatment of the Trachiniai is especially
strong and the chapter on the Ajax, a version of Ormand's award-winning
1996 article, will be required reading for anyone studying that play for
some time to come.[2]
After an initial (and excellent) chapter on the "Semantics of Greek
Marriage," which delineates the issues in a wider context, Ormand devotes
one chapter each to Sophocles' Trachiniai, Electra, Antigone, Ajax, and
Oidipous Tyrannos. There follow closing remarks on the exit of the silent
character, which the author takes as a figure for the position of women
both in Sophoclean tragedy and in Athenian society. The author strikes
exactly the right note in seeing Sophocles neither as a subversive feminist
ahead of his time, nor as an unthinking purveyor of his society's
assumptions about women. Rather, Ormand's Sophocles is forever testing,
exploring the contradictory nature of the institution of marriage and
women's place within it.
Ormand makes use -- as did Wohl -- of the Althusserian notion of
interpellation (or "hailing") to explain how ideologies constitute
subjects, making of the young woman a wife, for example. Linking this
concept to the Periclean citizenship laws, he argues that the construction
of "subject positions" is altered by changes in the nature of citizenship.
While it has been argued that the new emphasis on the status of the mothers
of Athenians brought women new prestige within the family, Ormand sees a
rather bleaker picture, in which women are left unfulfilled and silent, if
not dead, in the face of the demands of family and state. In play after
play, he shows how women's views of their situation in the oikos, the
lineage, the marriage, etc. differ from those of the men who also inhabit
these institutions. Sophoclean women, in Ormand's view, inevitably see
themselves as more central to the institutions that shape their identities
than do the men with whom they share the stage and their lives.
Ormand takes as his starting point that tragedy "performs its work" in part
"through the representation of other ideological structures (marriage,
funerals, class, etc.)," and furthermore takes marriage and tragedy to be
"analogous ideological structures." He sees Sophocles as interested in
representing the conflicts between marriage as creator of female
subjectivity and as economic exchange between men. This conflict is perhaps
clearest in the Trachiniai, where Ormand makes excellent use of Sedgwick's
concept of male homosocial desire to explain how Deianeira can so
thoroughly misunderstand her place in Heracles' world.[3] As Ormand argues,
she is not the subject of her marriage with Heracles, because for him, all
relationships are between men. Emblematic of her inability to see that, for
Heracles, relationships are between men is her inability to watch the
combat between Heracles and Acheloos that will determine her fate.
This episode is appropriately central to Ormand's reading of Deianeira's
tragedy. While I am in agreement with his overall treatment, I find one
aspect of it puzzling. In his discussion of the first stasimon, in which
the chorus reports on the combat that Deianeira could not bring herself to
witness, he chooses -- for reasons that are not at all clear -- to preserve
the transmitted reading MA/THR at line 526. The most common solution,
QATH/R, while not solving all textual problems, makes far more sense. The
chorus cannot be speaking of themselves as mothers when D. has already made
much of their virginal inexperience (line 143ff.). The thematic importance
of mothers and the appearance of the word a few lines later at 529, which
Ormand adduces in support of his reading, seem to serve better to explain a
spurious introduction of the word MA/THR at line 526. Here, as at a few
other places in the book, one wishes for more explanation of interpretative
choices.
A form of marriage to which Ormand has frequent recourse is that of the
epiklerate. For him, Electra, Antigone, and even Jocasta take on at least
some features of the epikleros. Although at times strained, this line of
argument opens up the issue of the ambiguous relationship of women to their
own patriline in many of these plays. Like Deianeira, who mistakenly
imagines herself starring in her own marriage, Electra sees herself as
central to the survival of her father's oikos, of which for a time she
seems to be an epikleros. With the arrival of Orestes, however, her role is
eclipsed and the play ends with the ambiguities of her position unresolved.
Some of the author's claims at this point are not sufficiently fleshed out,
for example that Orestes' arrival severs her connection with her father's
oikos and that her position "dramatizes the ideological paradox of
citizenship for the Athenian woman (75)".
Ormand's idea that Antigone turns Creon's idea of the interchangeability of
wives ("there are other fields to plough") against him is interesting as
partial explanation of her famous speech in which she says that a husband
or child is replaceable whereas a brother is not. Throughout the discussion
of this play, Antigone's relationship to her bloodline and the conflicting
claims of endogamy and exogamy play a central role. Two problems with the
discussion present themselves, however. The author's insistance on Antigone
as a sexual threat to good order is odd for this least erotic of all
heroines. It is Creon who insists on his son's attachment to her in crudely
erotic terms, while Haemon seems to be motivated by something more like
loyalty or affection. Secondly, the terms exogamy and endogamy are made a
mockery of in the complicated genealogy of Oidipous' offspring. Ormand is
aware of this but makes far less use of it than he might. Antigone is of
course related to Creon on both sides, and her marriage is doubly
endogamous. Attachment to her natal family is central to her character,
but her inability to "cross over to another oikos" (96), wonderfully
appropriate as it is, perhaps says as much about her family situation as it
does about Antigone herself.
In general, these kinship terms are used a bit impressionistically
throughout. (Is Hyllus' marriage to Iole really an example of endogamy? --
this seems to be confusing her physical location with her lineage. Even a
prior erotic attachment to Dad doesn't turn her into kin.) And since
Athenian descent is bilateral (although it gives priority to males and to
the paternal line), Antigone's insistence that kinship includes the
maternal line is not as anomalous as Ormand suggests.
The chapter on the Ajax is, as I have indicated, the strongest in the book
and presents a thoroughly original approach to the play and in particular
to the character of Tecmessa. Ormand brilliantly teases out her rhetorical
cleverness in invoking the model of Andromache as a way to improve her own
ambiguous position as the spear-prize of Ajax. He also goes a long way
toward explaining her strange silence at the end of the play. Why does she
not lament her fallen man? Having established herself as Ajax's wife, she
experiences the lot of wives: "We have seen before that women, once
married, tend to lose the very subjectivity that their new position seems
to confer on them" (118). For the author, her silence also reflects
Athenian ambivalence about women's role in funerary ritual.
So far so good, but to this reader, what follows overstates the case: "by
remaining silent, she adheres to the letter of the fifth-century law." This
seems a misunderstanding of the Solonian reforms -- to the extent of our
knowledge about them. Plutarch tells us of the prohibitions against set
laments (threnoi) by professionals, participation by relatives beyond the
limit of cousin's children, and lamentation of other dead besides those
being buried. While this certainly represented a serious curtailment of
women's role in lament, there is no evidence that a wife would be excluded
from lamenting her own husband at the time of burial. Thus Ormand's
contention that Tecmessa by not lamenting is acting according to the law
and showing herself to be a true wife in the best Athenian tradition does
not entirely hold up.
Even more important for Ormand's interpretations than Solon's funerary
reforms are the Periclean citizenship laws of the mid-fifth century. He
argues that even the citizenship legislation, which some see as an occasion
for the increased prestige of Athenian women, resulted instead in
foreclosed possibilities for them. One wonders whether he does not look
ahead to find a third largely unstated point of reference in Pericles'
advice to the women of Athens in the funeral oration, as reported (and no
doubt "improved") by Thucydides. This text, which appears only in a single
footnote, seems at times to animate Ormand's take on Periclean reforms and
their impact on women. Indeed, Pericles' remarks on the kleos of women
dovetail nicely with Ajax's gnomic statement that "silence brings
decoration to a woman" (line 293, see p.111).
The treatment of Oidipous Tyrannos, as the author explains, takes a
different tack from what precedes it. Here marriage is not a socially
constructed phenomenon but a given, while biological identity is suddenly
up for grabs. The treatment of the central role of misdirection in this
play, and the centrality of Jocasta to all the problematic relationships
among men, is excellent and there is much of interest in this chapter on
this most difficult of ancient tragedies. A number of less than fully
worked out suggestions are floated towards the end: a parody of marriage
between Creon and Oidipous, Jocasta as epikleros, and finally the notion
that at her death she laments the future children she will not live to
bear. The lines in question, 1242-7, seem clearly to indicate not fondness
for the experience of bearing Oidipous and the wish to have more children
but awareness of the terrible consequences of that birth for all concerned.
That I record these disagreements should be taken as a tribute to the
stimulating nature of this provocative book. Ormand's treatment of gender
issues in Sophocles will be of continuing interest to scholars of tragedy
and gender ideology in ancient Greece.
NOTES
[1] To list only a few in alphabetical order: Nancy Rabinowitz, Anxiety
Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women, Ithaca 1993; Richard Seaford,
"Wedding Ritual and Textual Criticism in Sophocles' `Women of Trachis',"
Hermes 114 (1986) 50-59 and other articles; Charles Segal, Tragedy and
Civilization, Cambridge 1981; Sophocles' Tragic World, Cambridge 1995 and
other articles; Victoria Wohl, Intimate Commerce, Austin 1998; Froma
Zeitlin, "The Politics of Eros in the Danaid Trilogy of Aeschylus," in R.
Hexter and D. Selden, Innovations of Antiquity, New York 1992, as well as
numerous other articles. In the interest of full disclosure I also note my
own work in progress: Dangerous Gifts: Ideologies of Marriage and Exchange
in Greek Myth and Tragedy.
[2] "Silent by Convention?: Sophocles' Tekmessa," AJP 117 (1996) 37-64 was
awarded the Gildersleeve Prize for the best article published in that
journal in 1996.
[3] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire, New York 1985.
[ Searches | BMCR-L | CLASSICS-L | LT-ANTIQ | Other Lists ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28critmail on Mon Jan 01 2001 - 06:02:16 EST