Dellner, 'Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9411
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9411-dellner-anxiety
@@@@94.1.2, Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled (I)
Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the
Traffic in Women. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp.
246. $14.95. ISBN-0-8014-8091-4 (pb).
Reviewed by Jennifer J. Dellner -- Reed College
Sorkin Rabinowitz presents a provocative and ultimately
unsettling analysis of the phenomenon of "the traffic in women"
in eight tragedies of Euripides. The phrase "traffic in women" in
the subtitle of the book derives from an article written in 1975
by Gayle Rubin, which has since become the locus classicus
of feminist literary and anthropological theory of women and
exchange. The prominence of Rubin highlights other theoretical
choices and exclusions which reveal a deeper agenda.[[1]] In the
conclusion of this study, S.R.recounts the following incident:
"When I presented my work at a conference several years ago,
someone in the audience asked me why we should continue to teach
and read this material. I admit that this is a problem for me,
given the competition for scarce resources in the curriculum, for
example." S.R. continues, "It is possible for feminist readers to
use these texts... (220)".
Her own ambiguity vis-a-vis the value of her subject matter
produces what I consider to be the book's most dominant flaw: the
assumption of the monolithic feminist "we" in a premise of
despair over what tragedy means to "us" (women). Indeed, in her
Introduction, S.R. speaks of adapting Althusser for "deployment
in the feminist arsenal" (12), while I am left wondering why I
need weaponry to approach these texts. S.R.'s assumptions are
"up-front," in that they are explained at the outset and embedded
in her interpretation. In what follows, I have noted several
theoretical moves which may make even a feminist reader uneasy;
since they often account for S.R.'s acceptance or rejection of a
certain understanding of the tragedies, I present them as I move
through the text.
In spite of an introductory section which traces out a by now
well-known route from Mauss to Gernet to Levi-Strauss to Rubin on
the exchange of gifts, women, and signs, S.R.'s analysis is more
Freudian than Marxist, and it is this approach which will
generate the most controversy. Her segue from Marxism to Freudian
psychoanalysis relies on their shared vocabulary of "the fetish."
Fetishism ties together the economy of (masculine) desire
(Freud), and the social construction of commodities (Marx), and
allows S.R. to "attend to the maculinity of Athens and stress
tragedy's ideological function" (9), i.e. to examine the
"cultural work" tragedy does when it makes its female characters
"discursive practices" (12) in its form(ul)ation of masculine
desire qua Athenian ideology. S.R.'s examination of the
cultural practice of Euripidean tragedy comes to a view of
tragedy as "comforting to men" (168), a far cry from recent views
of tragedy as a destabilizing or questioning influence on
Athenian life and politics (e.g. Goldhill's term,
"fractive").[[2]]
All in all, S.R.'s reading yields the following triangle: the
two species of commodified women are "Fetishized Victims," (Part
I), who are either "sacrificial" virgins or wives, and "Vengeful
Destoyers" (Part II), Matres Dolorosae, who become, in
opposition to their fetishized counterparts, unheimlich or
"uncanny"; both of these serve to produce "Men United" (Part
III). S.R.'s reliance on the Freudian concept of the
unheimlich to balance vengeful mothers with fetishized
young women clearly inclines her analysis toward a psychoanalytic
theory of male wish-fulfillment. S.R. makes good use of
Freudian-based feminist film criticism (Doane, deLauretis,
Mulvey) in her reading of female characters as projections of
male fantasy. It is in this concept of "public art" that S.R.
uses MacKinnon's work on ideology to relate the notions of male
sexual desire and commodified fantasy to the production of
epistemology (196).
Iphigenia (at Aulis) and Alcestis are S.R.'s main models for
the "sacrificial" women of Part I, though an examination of
Polyxena and Macaria supports S.R.'s reading of Iphigenia in the
first chapter. In the first section, S.R. opposes the supposed
"subject" status of women who sacrifice their lives (their
seeming volition and possible power) with the male glorification
("fetishization") of them which seeks to control it. In this
section, S.R. wishes to produce a "grammar of the plays of
sacrifice," where she argues that sacrifice is a form of
gift-exchange with the gods (31). She turns to work by Vernant
and Foley to make a further analogy between sacrifice and
marriage as comparable forms of exchange. Both marriage and
sacrifice, according to S.R., re-organize "natural" phenomena
(reproduction, meat-eating) into social, hierarchized behaviors
which advantage the male: "In sum," she writes, "marriage is like
sacrifice because in marriage woman is the offering through which
culture is constituted" (34).
Iphigenia, Polyxena, and Makaria are marked by their
"oscillation" between states as volunteering subjects and
idolized objects. S.R. has apparently borrowed the term
"oscillation" from Doane, and uses it five times in Part I--pages
54,71, 83, 98, 99--to mark the sense of movement between the
women's gestures at subjectivity/power, which marks them as
"uncanny," and their only act as subjects (submission), which
leads to their glorification and maintains the masculine-dominant
status-quo. Fetishism, according to S.R., "oscillates between
mutilation and adoration" (83), an explanation which has little
to do with Marxist theory, and much more to do with
Sorkin-Rabinowitz's use of "castration anxiety" to explain the
attempts of Athenian males to control their potentially
threatening women.
Herein lies a tension in S.R.'s analysis between the
universalizing tendencies of Freudian criticism and her attempt
to formulate a specifically Athenian male ideology. S.R.'s
reliance on psychoanalytic explanation often feels superfluous in
the face of her acute and perceptive readings of the plays
themselves, and many notions of what is specifically Athenian in
the plays is obscured by her discussion of what is
male/Euripidean. For example, it is not clear, in her final and
excellent analysis of Kreousa in the Ion, whether any male
could have written a different play:
Psychoanalytic theory speculates that the infant, denied the milk
of the mother (either because he is biting and hurting her or
because another child has come along to take his place), responds
with aggressive fantasies of destroying her but justifies his own
hostility by imagining that she is harming him. Euripides, taking
the part of the son, creates a scenario in which the mother does
harm to the infant first. Euripides justifies Ion's attack on
Kreousa by depicting her as an aggressor. (202-203)
Her analysis of the Ion and the Hippolytus in
Part III argues for this scenario (or primal scene) as the
governing fantasy of all the Euripidean tragedies under
consideration. The idolized women are merely the solution to the
"Vengeful Destroyers" (Hekabe, Alcmene, Medea and Phaidra) whom
she discusses in Part II. Unable to re-incorporate the power of
older powerful women under the rubric of fetished glory/virtue,
Euripidean tragedy manages their potential threat by pairing them
off with their younger, sacrificial counterparts, demonstrating
that these older women are indeed destructive of the social
order. As she writes of Hekabe, "In the beginning, she is
associated with the human realm as it faces the
unheimlich, but by the end she is instead viewed as a
manifestation of the uncanny itself" (116). S.R. views this
association as purely recuperative on the part of Athenian males,
but with implications which "can be positive"(105) for "us."
Athenian men "displace" their anxieties "aroused by and on behalf
of masculine civilization onto the female" by making the female
cede to the male spatially in the plots' narratives
(Hekabe, Hippolytus), and in general by using
displacement to deflect "audience attention from systemic
failings to [the women's] violence (108)". These women become a
"screen" for the projection of masculine anxieties about their
own (male) violence. However, "we" "can look for [postive] traces
of female subjectivity, but let us not fool ourselves that
Euripides applauds it" (154).
S.R. is at her best in this central section, perhaps because,
although psychoanalytic film theory lends her the notion of
displacement onto the screen of female characters, she lets go of
her tendency to use Freud to provide proof of what she finds, and
instead performs very acute and nuanced readings of the tragedies
which argue well for her findings. In Parts I and III, she seems
much more concerned with establishing the plays' cohesion with
Freudian paradigms than she is in Part II, where her use of
theory backgrounds, and never overshadows, her own interpretive
work.
Yet even here, her own findings often make S.R. nervous, and
prevent her from drawing certain conclusions, as she attempts to
quash any heroizing emotional response the women's strength
produces in her by retreating to a contemporary moral agenda. She
says of Medea's solution to her problems: "Given the realities of
child abuse in our own time, however, I find it problematic to
simply applaud Medea's infanticide and escape" (154). S.R.'s
objections make plain what some feel to be a difficulty of
reading as a feminist theorist: the notion that to be a feminist,
one must find something positive in these women, must be able to
identify with their strength and their choices. Because S.R.
finds such choices (whether submission or murder) to be morally
unacceptable, she cannot accept that a real woman would make
these choices; only a construct in a collective male fantasy
would: "the murder of the children is his [Euripides'] choice,
not Medea's" (153). Her uneasiness denies the fact that women
have chosen to kill and been heroized for it (Bonnie and Clyde,
for example, evoke similar emotions in some, as do Thelma and
Louise).
Granted the presence of difficulties such as these, S.R.'s
analyses of the final two plays (the Hippolytus again from
the Father-Son vantage point, and the Ion) with the
"arsenal" fully deployed--all terms operational--are well worth
foregoing one's qualms. Although it may be jarring for a
classicist of the non-Freudian persuasion to encounter the
phrase, "The pre-Oedipal phase of Ion's life" (193), a reliance
on Freudian scenarios is nicely counterbalanced in Part III by
S.R.'s articulation of what may be a historically specific
psychology of the influence of repressed homoerotic desire
between Athenian men. She states as a general principle that "The
possibility or probability of an erotic charge between father and
son was denied in antiquity because that relationship founded the
social order. Horizontal desire for one like oneself is the
repressed, unconscious desire of this text [Hippolytus];
it is gratified by being transformed into a vertical (asexual)
desire of father for son (174)". This dynamic of desire is
demonstrated in the Ion as well, and it is in S.R.'s smart
and well-supported readings of the texts themselves that readers
will find well-founded provocation toward more exploration and
research.
S.R. has undertaken some risks by exposing, in our own terms,
the psychic and moral dilemmas which may underlie the tragedies'
exposition of the so many powerful, brave, and troubling women
who are at the core of Athenian thought as we know it. Instead of
arguing that the Greeks existed in a realm "Before Sexuality,"
Sorkin-Rabinowitz concludes that the insurgent power of women
arises from a strong, historically situated, pre-Oedipal drive
(220-221), of which Athenian men were only too aware, and had to
constantly attempt to manage in a public realm where their most
repressed fears could be rendered safe by a particular mechanism
of fantasy.
NOTES
1. There are places where recent work on exchange which she has
excluded could be used to bolster her argument. For example:
Jean-Joseph Goux. tr. Curtiss Cage (1990) Symbolic Economies
after Marx and Freud Cornell U. Press; Marilyn Strathern
(1988) The Gender of the Gift U. of CA Press; Annette B.
Weiner (1992) Inalienable Possessions U. of CA Press.
2. Simon Goldhill (1986) Reading Greek Tragedy Cambridge
U.Press.