Spoken Like a Woman

Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama

Laura McClure

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400832446
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du théâtre

In ancient Athens, where freedom of speech derived from the power of male citizenship, women's voices were seldom heard in public. Female speech was more often represented in theatrical productions through women characters written and enacted by men. In Spoken Like a Woman, the first book-length study of women's speech in classical drama, Laura McClure explores the discursive practices attributed to women of fifth-century b.c. Greece and to what extent these representations reflected a larger reality. Examining tragedies and comedies by a variety of authors, she illustrates how the dramatic poets exploited speech conventions among both women and men to construct characters and to convey urgent social and political issues.From gossip to seductive persuasion, women's verbal strategies in the theater potentially subverted social and political hierarchy, McClure argues, whether the women characters were overtly or covertly duplicitous, in pursuit of adultery, or imitating male orators. Such characterization helped justify the regulation of women's speech in the democratic polis. The fact that women's verbal strategies were also used to portray male transvestites and manipulators, however, suggests that a greater threat of subversion lay among the spectators' own ranks, among men of uncertain birth and unscrupulous intent, such as demagogues skilled in the art of persuasion. Traditionally viewed as outsiders with ambiguous loyalties, deceitful and tireless in their pursuit of eros, women provided the dramatic poets with a vehicle for illustrating the dangerous consequences of political power placed in the wrong hands.

Chapter One

THE CITY OF WORDS: SPEECH IN THE ATHENIAN POLIS

IN A HIGHLY metatheatrical moment from Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, the tragic poet Euripides instructs his kinsman to disguise himself as a woman in order to spy on the female participants of the Thesmophoria, a women-only religious festival, in which the poet is to be put on trial for slandering women. The Relative equips himself with a prostitute’s yellow gown and a woman’s veil, breast-band, and slippers, and even submits to shaving and the female practice of pubic depilation. After completing his physical transformation, he is instructed to speak like a woman: “When you talk, see to it that you speak cleverly and persuasively like a real woman” (267–68). But in Aristophanes’ play, speaking like a woman entails several adjustments, many of which are grammatical, since the ancient Greek language marks the gender of the speaker more strongly than English. And yet as the play progresses, the Relative repeatedly undercuts his feminine self-presentation with his masculine use of obscenity. The incongruity of gender and genres denoted by the Relative’s continual shifting from masculine to feminine speech not only makes for good comedy, it also affords insight into the role of speech in constructing dramatic characters on the fifth-century Athenian stage.

The Relative’s performance reminds us that female parts were played by male actors who rendered plausible impersonations of women primarily through their speech and gestures, and that there was a set of speaking conventions for portraying women that may or may not have corresponded to the practices of actual spoken language in ancient Greece. These conventions were flexible and could be freely deployed by the poet for dramatic effect. In the Agamemnon, for example, Clytemnestra is repeatedly characterized as speaking like a man, while Blepyrus, in a moment of comic pathos, calls upon a quintessentially feminine deity, Eileithyia, as he strives for a birth of quite another sort in Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae. Although of central importance in constructing character, speaking conventions in classical drama also have a broader social and political significance, particularly given the role of free speech (parrhēsia) in the Athenian democracy. The aims of this book are to identify the verbal genres associated with men and women in the ancient Greek literary tradition, especially in fifth-century drama; to explore their contexts; and to consider how a few plays deploy male and female discursive practices as a vehicle for exploring the function and status of the speech of adult citizen males in the democratic polis (“city-state”) during the second half of the fifth century B.C.E.

The importance of gender for understanding political identity and symbolic structures in ancient Greece, what Vernant has termed the “mental world” of the Greeks, has already been elucidated by many classical scholars.¹ Whereas the earliest scholarship on women in antiquity focused on the status of women and the realia of their lives,² the awareness that male-authored texts always mediate ancient views of gender and that the experience of ancient women could not thus be fully recovered compelled many feminist classical scholars to consider the conceptual foundations that inform the literary and mythical representation of women and how they intersect with social and political institutions. Central to this project has been the study of women and gender in Attic drama, a genre that offers a rich array of complex female characters. Two important essays in the early 1980s can be said to have inaugurated this study: Foley’s “The Concept of Women in Athenian Drama,” and Zeitlin’s “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama.”³ Both pieces shifted the focus from recovering women’s historical reality to understanding the conceptual framework behind their literary and mythic representation and relating it to the social and ideological context of democratic Athens.

At the same time, the increased attention to dramatic performance as a social institution, initiated by Goldhill’s essay on the City Dionysia, along with the structuralist and anthropological readings of the French school, including scholars such as Vernant, Vidal-Naquet, Detienne, and Loraux, have radically altered how contemporary critics think about the meanings and functions of fifth-century Athenian drama. For these critics, Attic drama continually engaged in a dialogue with the other discursive spaces of the city.⁴ In addition, the work of Foucault, whose History of Sexuality is based in part on Dover’s research on homosexuality in ancient Greece, has had a major impact on the study of women in antiquity, shifting the focus away from women exclusively to the idea of gender as a vehicle for negotiating power.⁵ The concept of gender as a social category that determines how power is distributed among various members of society further illuminates the link between literary representation and social institutions.

The privileging of speech as the sign of citizen status and the concomitant strictures placed on women’s nonreligious public speech in democratic Athens, on the one hand, and the presence of a complex array of speaking female characters in Attic drama, on the other, suggest a dialectical relation between the two discursive spheres. Because adult male citizens were the exclusive possessors of political power in the classical polis, fifth-century Athenian drama, produced by men and for men, may be regarded, in the words of Case, “as allies in the project of suppressing real women and replacing them with masks of patriarchal production.”⁶ In the same way, literary representations of women may be viewed as male constructs appropriated by men for the purpose of speaking about male concerns rather than as simple reflections of social reality, as Zeitlin, Halperin, and others have argued.⁷ Thus the constructed women of Attic drama may serve as figures of substitution that convey social and political issues important to men, particularly the complicated problem of speech and its status in the democratic polis. As Halperin observes, “Greek men effectively silenced women by speaking for them on those occasions when men chose to address significant words to one another in public, and they required the silence of women in public in order to be able to employ this mode of displaced speech—in order to impersonate women—without impediment.”⁸ But Attic drama should not be understood simply as a univocal, hegemonic discourse in service of civic ideology; it is a complex, polyvocal, and polysemous genre that alternately subverts and reinforces the dominant agenda. Even social and legal discourses, genres traditionally considered less ambiguous and more reflective of social reality than drama, do not adequately describe the conflict, anxiety, and ambivalence that normally characterize the regulation of social norms, in Athens as elsewhere.⁹

Recent scholarship on the representation of women in fifth-century Athenian drama has tended to be more optimistic and, not coincidentally, more sympathetic to the possibility that citizen women actually attended the dramatic festivals.¹⁰ This strand of scholarship has suggested that the fictive unreality of Athenian drama embodies and extends the democratic ideal to all individuals through its dialogic form. The diversity and complexity of female roles displayed in Attic drama, as well as those of slaves and barbarians, disclose “an implicit egalitarian vision whose implementation in the actual society which produced it was absolutely inconceivable.”¹¹ The affiliation between drama and democracy as an art form is exemplified, although not very positively, by the character of Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs, who describes his tragedy as dēmokratikon, “democratic,” because it allows all types of individuals to speak—the matron, the slave, the master, the maiden, and the aging widow (Ar. Ran. 949–52). Echoing Euripides’ character, Henderson has similarly argued that the tragic and comic stage brought the concerns of Athenian women out of the house, providing “a vicarious public voice for the one class of citizens otherwise debarred from public expression, thus (in good Dionysiac fashion) exposing the artificiality of, and in effect inverting, the public and ‘official’ pattern of authority.”¹² Given the preponderance of negative opinions voiced about women in the plays and their generally unflattering portrayal, it is hard to see tragic and comic plays as exemplars either of social realism or of “art’s ‘utopian tendency.’ “¹³ Whereas some plays may represent women as speaking positively and authoritatively on behalf of the city or family, like Iphigeneia in Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis, or Aethra in Suppliants, Attic drama more commonly depicts women’s speech, even when it takes a ritual form, as disruptive and subversive of social stability. Nonetheless, the very presence of women in tragic drama (and it is noteworthy that only one extant tragedy, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, contains no female characters), and to a lesser extent, comedy, indicates how necess...