Foley, 'Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow. Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9408
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9408-foley-euripides
Charles Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow. Art,
Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and
Hecuba. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Pp.
xiii, 313. $45.00. ISBN 0-8223-1360-X.
Reviewed by Helene P. Foley -- Barnard College, Columbia
University
This book is a collection of previously published articles.
Several major themes draw these studies together: the way that
Euripides' tragedy reflects self-consciously on its own discourse
and defines its place in a poetic tradition and the way that
issues of gender are used to "question traditional values and the
familiar definitions of male heroism" (p. 4). Ritual and
lamentation play a significant role in defining Euripides'
attempts to control an audience's response to his plays and to
reach emotional closure. At the same time, tragedy divides the
worlds of men and women, then intermingles them with disastrous
effects that leave serious issues unresolved in the concluding
scenes. Women are driven to problematic actions by their
passionate concern for family, but the male characters fail to
affirm fully heroic or communal values in response. In
Hippolytus and Hecuba, "the resulting justice, as
is often the case in Greek tragedy, is retributive rather than
restorative." (p. 229)
Of the three chapters on Alcestis, the first explores
the play's self-conscious manipulation of genre issues, the shift
from a tragic beginning to the play's concluding rescue of
Alcestis from death. The statue of Alcestis that Admetus proposes
to place in his bed to assuage his loss of his wife plays a
critical role in defining the play's self-reflexivity: "the
statue mediates between art and ritual... and helps to locate the
play itself in the shifting ground between rite and mimetic art."
(p. 45) In the end, the play "refuses to have an ending. For that
nonending to come about, however, the play must break out of the
female-dominated house to the realm of male generosity and
hospitality, male heroism, and ultimately, the male-dominated
civic art of the theater." (p. 47) Yet Alcestis' silence, her
unpaid dues to the world of the dead, undercut the "comic"
closure of the symbolic wedding reenacted in the closing scenes
as Heracles gives Admetus back his bride.
The second chapter on Alcestis deals first with the
play's unusual representation of an "ordinary" death on stage and
with the problems raised by Admetus' process of grieving for his
wife. Public lamentation by a male figure is problematic in an
Attic context, and Admetus' grief threatens to feminize him.
Segal argues that Admetus learns something from grieving for his
wife, but this learning process is cut short by the play's
conclusion. The third chapter expands on the play's partial
gender reversals. Alcestis' heroic death confines Admetus in the
more feminine domestic realm; his reacquisition of male identity
through meeting the obligations of hospitality requires him to
betray his wife.
Failed communication between male and female worlds is central
to the three chapters on Hippolytus. Seeing and hearing
prove unreliable modes of acquiring knowledge. Female speech,
writing, and passion violate the silence and invisibility
required of the chaste wife and disrupt the "discourse of truth
between males" (p. 99); but this discourse is reestablished by
Artemis in the final scene between Hippolytus and Theseus.
Nevertheless, although the once alienated Hippolytus is restored
to the city by becoming "a common grief for all the citizens"
(1462), the cult for young women on the verge of marriage that
will be established in his honor continues to link him to a
feminine world.
In Hecuba, the barbarian women, Hecuba and especially
Polyxena, establish a position of moral superiority relative to
the expedient Greeks in the play's earlier scenes. Although
Hecuba ultimately becomes bestial and morally corrupt in her
pursuit of a bloody revenge against the treacherous barbarian
Polymestor, the Greeks brutally sacrifice Polyxena and collude
with Hecuba's revenge. Thus, "in watching these savage, brutal
barbarians," the Greeks "were really watching themselves." (190)
In this play "standards of public policy in the assembly confront
standards of private justice in the law courts." (211) Segal
views the play as "a devastating critique of a world that has
lost touch with basic moral values and a language that could
articulate them" (p. 210). Finally, the relative absence of the
gods in this tragedy (there are some hints of their presence in
acquistion of burial for the ghostly Polydorus, the suspension of
the winds, and the concluding prophecy of Polymestor) stresses
human responsibility for the tragic outcome.
Because these chapters were originally published as separate
articles, there is, despite revision, a good deal of repetition
from one chapter to the next. This, and the relentlessly detailed
documentation of Segal's points, makes the book slow reading at
times. At the same time, these detailed, often rich close
readings are considerably more original than the interpretations
offered in the book as a whole. The chapter on "Law and
Universals" in the Hecuba, for example, adopts the
position of many critics that the play traces the moral
degradation of the heroine and exposes contradictions in
contemporary Greek rhetoric and morality. Yet the close reading
of terms such as nomos, the detailed exposure of
contradictions in the characters' arguments, and the balanced
assessment of Hecuba's violence in the context of the Greeks' own
amoral expediency, offer a more complex and nuanced reading than
that of Segal's predecessors. I was disappointed, however, that
he did not discuss the provocative reading of these same moral
issues by Martha Nussbaum.[[1]] Similarly, in the discussions of
Hippolytus, Segal expands on Knox's and Zeitlin's
treatment of speech, silence, signs, writing, and in Zeitlin's
case, the relation of these issues to gender in the play.[[2]]
(Originality would have been difficult in any case. Segal himself
had already written seven previous articles on this play, as well
as general discussions of speech and writing in tragedy). The
expansion, however, demonstrates the complex and pervasive
deployment of these themes. There is nothing new in the way that
Segal frames his analysis of gender polarities in tragedy. Gender
and tragic space, for example, has been a pervasive topic of
late. Aristophanes himself stressed the dangers posed by female
passion to public order and discourse in Euripides. Yet Segal's
readings have the virtue of presenting a balanced picture of the
issues by stressing in detail the male as well as the female
contribution to the breakdown of gender boundaries in these
plays.
The close reading that constitutes this book's virtues also
characterizes its limits. These plays were, at least originally,
first and foremost designed as performances in a particular
social and historical context. Segal tends to over-emphasize
verbal correspondences that occur at widely-spaced intervals as
the basis of his interpretations. The folding and unfolding of
Hippolytus' hands and Phaedra's tablets are a case in point (pp.
117-18). Hippolytus unfolds his hands to the gods (1190-93); his
hands cannot be unfolded from his reins (1236); Phaedra's tablet
unfolds to reveal hidden secrets (864). The unfolding of the
tablet is thematically critical, since the play stresses the
dangerous revelation of what should be kept secret; the
unfoldings of Hippolytus' hands have a different and uncertain
thematic importance.
Segal can also overwork the possible connections between
images. He builds an entire chapter on the ability of clothing to
"conceal the true form beneath its folds" and represent "the
dignity that violence can strip away." (165) Yet does the image
of the suppliant Odysseus concealing his hand in Hecuba's robes
relate in significant ways to hiding or transience? (p. 166) And
is this concealment comparable to Odysseus' attempt to prevent
Polyxena from supplicating him by concealing his hand in his
robes? The two gestures are pointedly symmetrical, but have
different implications. It is as hard to see a relation between
this use of clothing to conceal and the deceptive use of robes by
the Trojan women to conceal gold or weapons, as it is to
attribute any consistent importance in the dramatic deployment of
clothing imagery to the fact that the women are the makers of
clothing in Greek culture. The chapter is entitled "Golden Armor
and Servile Robes." Segal argues that Trojan gold, in motivating
both the death of Polydorus and the deception of Polymestor, is
like clothing implicated in tragic transitions ("the degeneration
of tragic values" [p. 160]). Yet the single link between gold and
clothing in the play occurs in the description of Achilles'
golden armor, which, as Segal points out, represents not
transience or concealment but divinity and heroic permanence.
Finally, Segal's treatment of lamentation might have been
considerably different if he had been able to profit from recent
anthropologically and historically-oriented studies of the
subject, which raise questions about the ability of lamentation
to perform the resolving acts of closure that Segal attributes to
it.[[3]] As these studies show, lament may assist the mourner (or
the audience) in coming to terms with death, but it can also
raise unsettling questions about heroic and military values,
perpetuate grief, and foment revenge and passion. In
Hecuba, for example, it is no accident that Hecuba
inaugurates simultaneously her lament for the dead Polydorus and
her revenge (864-87): "Alas, my son, my son, I begin a bacchic
lament, having learnt just now of your evils from a spirit of
revenge."
NOTES
1. The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge 1986.
2. B. M. W. Knox, Yale Classical Studies 13 (1952) 3-31
= Word and Action. Baltimore 1979: 205-30 and F. I.
Zeitlin, "The Power of Aphrodite: Eros and the Boundaries of the
Self in the Hippolytus," in P. Burian, ed., Directions
in Euripidean Criticism: A Collection of Essays. Durham, N.C.
1985: 52-111, 189-208.
3. A. Caraveli, "The Bitter Wounding; the Lament as Social
Protest in Rural Greece," in J. Dubisch, ed., Gender and Power
in Rural Greece, Princeton 1986: 169-84; N. C. Serematakis.
The Last Word. Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani,
Chicago 1991; G. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices: Women's
Lament in Greek Literature, New York and London 1992; and H.
P. Foley, "The Politics of Tragic Lamentation," in A.H.
Sommerstein, S. Halliwell, J. Henderson, and B. Zimmermann, eds.,
Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis, Bari 1993: 101-43.