Zeitlin, 'Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9411
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9411-zeitlin-anxiety
@@@@94.1.3, Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled (II)
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 Froma I. Zeitlin -- Princeton University
Rabinowitz has written a very strong and provocative book. It
engages the reader at every turn in a contest, even conflict,
between present and past, yes and no. Passionately argued, at
times disarmingly confessional, and richly documented with
sources and authorities of every kind, this work takes an
uncompromising stance towards Euripidean tragedy, or to be more
exact, toward certain Euripidean plays, which exemplify R.'s
approach in her commitment to a particular kind of feminist
scholarship and principles of reading. In this enterprise, R.
acknowledges a serious split in her allegiances. For her, the
feminist and the Hellenist are sharply divided, even antagonistic
to one another. She is caught therefore between her attachment
to the canonical texts of Greek literature and her desire to
recuperate them for a "resistant" reading that would expose the
patriarchal ideology at work. I will return to this central
issue further below.
This recuperative effort requires a demystification, wherever
possible, of roles assigned to Euripidean women, whatever their
age, stance, status, or fate may be. These interventions are all
strategies, whether disguised or overt, of strengthening a
masculine system of values and particularly of bonds between men.
This position is not in itself new. Others have outlined the
uses of tragedy to educate male citizens in the city and have
taken cognizance of its institutional significance in shaping and
being shaped by the cultural and political life of Athens.
Others too have pointed to the value of Levi-Strauss' famous
discussion of marriage as a system of exchange between families
in which "women are to be exchanged as signs" in a transaction
that engages only males (father and husband). Sex antagonism has
long been noted as the very backbone of tragic plots and
structures, as has the threat to men of women's exercise of
power, whatever the circumstances, and the concomitant need to
contain it. The cultural correlations between silence and
chastity, and conversely, between speech and sexuality have also
been demonstrated by more than one scholar, along with the rules
for an honor and shame system, which is built on men's anxiety
about (and suspicion of) women's sexual desires. But no one goes
as far as R. in insisting on an almost unbridgeable gap that
separates the two genders, and in the process, no one has so
thoroughly excluded female characters (and women) from any stake
in the culture and society they inhabit, except perhaps one
acquired through duress and the cultivation of a false
consciousness. Women are ultimately pawns of men and male
interests. Cut off from any female community (in which it is
presumed they could properly express themselves as "subjects"),
whether represented as strong or weak, heroic or vindictive,
loving or vengeful, these women characters in R's analyses, are
always subject to domination, disparagement, displacement,
denegation, disinheritance, and not infrequently, disgrace.
Whatever ironies we may detect in the work of that most famous
ironist, Euripides, whatever complications and dilemmas arise in
the interaction between the sexes, whatever social and political
critique may be embedded in the plays (all acknowledged by
R.)--are subsumed under the fundamental negativity and use-value
that attend the representation of women, who, at best, exist to
give male heirs to the father's line and who maintain no rights
over their bodies, or indeed their souls, even when they might
seem to do so. Men may "own" them in marriage; they may even
sacrifice them in place of marriage, and female voices, if not
silenced, are always available for appropriation by men.
Compulsory heterosexuality for women enforces the system (as
Gayle Rubin argued in "The Traffic in Women," her well-known
rejoinder to Levi-Strauss) but the social structure is
"consistent with, even predicated upon, homosocial behavior for
men" (a concept pressed by Eve Sedgwick). Hence, as R. argues,
"female identification with men supports male power by dividing
women and making them seem to be agents of their own suffering;
men's same sex relations similarly support male power." 21. R.
claims her desire to avoid a reading of Euripides that ultimately
makes women only victims; she would like to recognize the
strength of women characters "without accepting the
interpretation men have built into that construction" or without
having to endorse women's actions she would find morally
objectionable. In the end, however, it seemed to this reviewer
that R's readings inevitably place Euripides' women in the
victim's position, whether they literally serve as sacrificial
victims or eventually lose the audience's sympathy, as R. sees
it, through excessive modes of retaliation.
Interestingly enough, R. wants to see Athenian women as
attending the performances in the theater (a still hotly debated
issue),[[1]] whose presence might "lead perhaps to [their]
continuing subjection." 12. Or, she suggests, the plays "set
forth codes of behavior giving women in the audience reason to
participate in the culture; on the other hand, they reinforce
men's need and right to continue to control women. Women in the
ancient audience may have, like many later readers, resisted this
structure proposed to them, by focusing on the power and the
women's community behind the text." 14. Ancient viewer and modern
reader strangely coalesce here (and elsewhere). "Subjectivity,"
it might seem, is a timeless commodity. In the frustrating lack
of access to women's private lives in antiquity, however, it is
difficult, even impossible, except perhaps through imaginative
identification, to establish the nature and variety of women's
relations with one another or to define their (evolving?)
horizons of expectation for subjectivity and self-expression
(except as ventriloquized through male-authored texts and figural
representations). It is equally difficult to walk the tightrope
between appeal to modern critical theories of every sort as
legitimating (and informing) the entire enterprise and the risks
of anachronism or overreading. Rabinowitz is a sophisticated
critic; she is very conscious of these epistemological traps,
even if she does not always escape them in constructing her
arguments.
The book is divided into three parts, unified by the theme of
"the exchange of women," which always and everywhere confirms
their subordinate position as actors (and subjects) in the
society. Part I examines the "sacrifice" plays (Iphigenia in
Aulis, Hekabe, and Alcestis) in which women
freely chose death in the face of masculine demands and are
heroized by them for it. Part II addresses the "strong" women
who "resist the norms imposed on them" (Hekabe,
Medea, Hippolytos) but whose "strength" is eroded
at the end, at least in the withdrawal of "audience approval" of
them. Part III turns to plays centered on young men
(Hippolytos, Ion) to explore the ways in which
homosocial bonds between men are constructed at women's,
particularly maternal figures', expense; if women are needed at
all, it is in order to facilitate the passage of the son to the
father. Each chapter ends with some tentative discussion of how
a modern feminist, dedicated to enhancing the position of women,
might resist these structures and sort out the possible (and
positive) ways of discerning an admirable feminine power, while
discarding the "baggage" of male authorship that accompanies it.
The first two sections draw upon the Freudian concepts of the
"fetish" and the "uncanny" (unheimlich) as updated through
poststructuralist and feminist criticism ( especially, film
theory). For Freud, the fetish is the substitute for the
mother's imagined castration, which allows him "to understand
that she does not have a penis but yet he can endow her with
one," a move that reassures him his own organ is intact. In
Rabinowitz's reading (through Mulvey, de Lauretis, and others),
the female sacrificial heroine is a fetishized object available
to the male gaze. She is overvalued as an object of adulation
but also reassuring to men, since she is coopted into supporting
a masculine code of behavior. Hence virgins' voluntary
self-sacrifice is a way of punishing them without seeming to have
done so. Iphigenia, for example, is compelled to transfer her
allegiance from her mother to her father and then from father to
the 'fatherland' in the name of all of Greece as the sequence of
moves that justifies her abrupt decision to go as a willing
sacrifice at Aulis, while her craving for fame as a replacement
for husband and children is read as a masculine desire that only
reaffirms the gender code. As for Polyxena, her choice of
sacrificial death (and the arrangement of her body for it) in the
face of no acceptable alternative, does not make her "a subject
as she would wish but an object of sadistic murderous desire;" in
dying, she "enables the army both to accept and deny what they
take to be women's castration," by baring her breast but covering
her genitals. 60.
The "uncanny" (unheimlich) on the other hand, draws its
power, not from open display, like the fetish, but from secrecy
and concealment in private parts (heim) that turns the
familiar into the terrifying--something "familiar and
old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the
process of represssion." 25. The strong older woman, especially
the hag figure (Hekabe or Alkmene in the Heracleidae) or
the demonic (e.g., Medea), well represents these creatures of
excess who do terrifying things to men. The Hekabe, in
particular, shows the two forces at work in two different
figures: the young virgin (Polyxena), whose sacrifice is
heavily eroticized and her aged vengeful and "sexualized" mother,
who purportedly pimps for her daughter Cassandra and entices a
man and his children into the secret recesses of her tent for a
bloody revenge. Creousa's attempted murder of her child with the
drops of the Gorgon's blood (Ion) also places her in
league with these other "uncanny" figures, after first winning
our sympathy for her plight. Medea, of course, accomplishes
where Creousa fails, and without the safety net of misrecognizing
the identity of her progeny (as Creousa does), she even manages
to get away with it; Medea's "strength" in this instance only
increases men's need to control women and to beware of marriages
that are not properly organized according to the rules of
exchange. Alcestis is central to the general analytical frame:
she begins as a fetish object (in the statue Admetos promises to
make of her once she is gone) but ends in the realm of the
uncanny (as the veiled ghost figure who returns). "Alcestis's
death implies weakness (and by analogy, castration, impotence, or
lack) and thus leads Admetos to fabricate the fetish [the statue]
to reassure himself that he is still alive, still has the
phallus," and can therefore control woman; on the other hand,
reading the effigy (cold, stiff) as the "phallic woman," it is
suggested that Admetos also "reconstitutes her as himself" so
that "his dream of going to bed with the statue thus fulfills his
homoerotic desires."
I am tempted to ask at this point: what about Laodameia's
fabrication of an effigy to replace her deceased husband
Protesilaos, the latter also the title of another early
Euripidean play? The plot, as we generally take it to be,
certainly more than fulfills the male-centered scenario. She
makes the statue which she keeps in her room, pretending it to be
a god. A servant, however, catches her kissing it, reports it to
her father, who, despite her protests, orders it burned, and she
in turn throws herself into the blaze (not unlike Evadne in
Euripides' Suppliants). A woman flouts the rules, it
would seem, by refusing to allow herself to be exchanged again,
now that she is a widow, even though her late husband (as one
fragment of the play suggests) may have stipulated just that.
And even if she asserts herself again in escaping male control,
she might only be confirming more than one man's wishful fantasy
that his wife cannot live without him. But, more to the point,
how does classical Freudian theory apply in this case? How does
it explain the female's desire to reconstitute her lost husband
as her fetish object, on the basis of perceptual notions about
her body? Is she now truly the phallic woman in some larger
sense?[[2]] More importantly, how for either male or female
psyche, can one transpose Freudian theory to classical antiquity
without encountering a certain culture shock and a sense of
serious misfit between the two? If anything, the majority of
ancient evidence suggests that women's sex was not imagined as a
lack or the result of "castration"; a more usual pairing, in
fact, as the famous passage in Plato's Timaeus suggests,
is penis and uterus (at times, penis and breasts), not penis and
vagina. Additionally, even if the phallus is made to stand for
masculine identity in general, for andreia and the
exercise of male control, does not such a reading of the
Alcestis reduce the complexities of the play to a genital
game, one which cannot be easily supported by relevant cultural
data?
R. goes still further, for example, in her discussion of the
relation between Hippolytos and Theseus at the end of
Hippolytos. Concluding an incisive examination of the
difficulties in the father-son bond from a social point of view,
she probes more deeply for signs of a repressed desire in the
text, which unleashes paternal phallic sadism against the son (in
the bull from the sea), before leading to the son's embrace in
his father's arms at the end. The play "enacts the story of the
destruction of (not the desire for) the mother, and the desire
for (not the destruction) of the father. The heterosexual rape
of Phaedra is after all a fiction; the truth of the tale is the
(dominant-submissive) violence of incest repressed between father
and son." 187. In the first place, if Theseus loses both wife
and son, how does he stand to gain it all, as R. claims? More to
the point, fantasy, repression, and unconscious wishes may
underlie much of imaginative literature, including that of the
Athenians, but how is one to control or support access to them?
Why should an Athenian audience fill in an alternate portrait of
their civic founder,Theseus, which portrays him as regularly
"raping" women, including Hippolytus' mother (never mentioned in
the play) and then transfer this charge to his son, the
virgin-worshipping Amazon's child? How do Greek myth and social
practices, dreams and visual images, articulate anxieties about
father-son rivalry and also bonding? It is not that there is not
much to learn from Freud--from his views about gender, the body,
and the making of culture, along with such psychic techniques as
repression, condensation, displacement, antithesis, etc. The
question is rather what limits are there to such interpretations,
as even modern literary critics confronted with Freudian theory,
are quick to acknowledge?
I single out this radical instance to express my more general
concern with R.'s methodology and her eclecticism in bringing in
all sorts of modern authorities, while striving to remain true to
secondary sources that are closer to home. The numerous
quotations, which demonstrate the wide range of her reading and
her earnest efforts to create a conversation between what she
perceives as two potentially opposite audiences (classicists and
feminists) are at times illuminating, at other times distracting,
but sometimes they even undermine the argument itself and the
often excellent close readings of texts that rely on "native"
categories of thought and cultural concepts. Can all forms of
theory, whatever their provenance, happily coexist with one
another, regardless of the latent contradictions between them?
Can they be taken out of context, as they often are in R.,
inserted merely as quotes to justify one or another point? Are
modern ideas about rape and pornography easily assimilated to
Euripidean drama? The question of allegiance arises again, not
just between one theory or another, but as to which comes first
for the critic: ancient texts or modern theory? Clearly, we come
to these texts conditioned by our own environment and our own
modes of framing discussion and analysis, but those elusive
qualities we call tact and discretion seem to me more productive
routes to convincing strategies of reading.
The largest difficulty I find with R.'s study, however, stems
from the extremes to which she applies her ruling thesis. The
"bad" women like Hekabe must be vilified as much as possible to
confirm men's fear of the uncanny female. Aside from asking what
Hekabe's future metamorphosis into a dog might mean in Greek
terms and for a Greek audience, should we neglect to mention that
Polymestor also predicts Agamemnon's death upon his return to
Argos? We could reply that Polymestor is punishing Agamemnon for
his support of the "uncanny" woman's cause by handing the king on
to another "uncanny" figure, Clytemnestra, for similar
entrapment. But is there not more to be observed in this
barbarian's 'triumph in defeat' over a Greek, and also in
Hekabe's repudiation of what men value most? In another vein,
the sincerity of Theseus' lament for his wife in the
Hippolytos must be dismissed as far as possible, so as to
press for the exclusive significance of paternity and sons'
relations with fathers. Hippolytos' misogynistic tirade against
all women is allowed more representative value for normative
beliefs in the culture than his fate might have us believe.[[3]]
Creousa's position in the Ion is undermined so as to
problematize the validity of her rape in the audience's mind and
to reduce the import of the mother-son relation in order to
validate Apollo's paternity and his right to confer his son on
another father.
R. could have profited from stressing the patriarchal basis of
Creousa's standing as an epikleros, who, in the absence of
male heirs, produces a child to carry on her father's line. To
be sure, the epiklerate elevates the daughter's status in the
family. But this maneuver also certainly instantiates her
"use-value," since she is now required to remain attached to her
father rather than her husband in matters of procreation and to
produce children whose fatherhood she is not free to assign. Yet
it seems unfair to accuse Apollo of usurping the woman's
nurturant function and to dismiss Ion's surrogate mother, the
Pythia, as merely a tool of the god. Trophe refers to
mother's actual nurture from the breast, whose absence is mourned
over by Ion and Creousa alike. But trophe has a broader
referent in child-rearing, which is the responsibility of both
parents, and it also allows for fosterage through parental
substitutes. Moreover, what makes Creousa interesting as a
dramatic character, as a thinking and acting "subject," is her
own ambivalence about her role in exposing the child and perhaps
her ambivalence too, after the fact, about her union with a god,
not a mortal. Then too, if she is to endorse a legal fiction in
sustaining Xouthos' paternity so as to ensure her son's social
standing in the polis, she is not actually separated from Ion, as
R. maintains, but goes with him to Athens (with Athena as guide)
and, as Athena predicts, she and Xouthos will have children of
their own in the future.
In R.'s view, everything a woman is represented as saying or
doing can be used against her; if noble, then displaced from the
male; if heroic, then shoring up male self-esteem; if violent,
then fulfilling men's worst fears, if tender, then also
compromised, etc. This single-minded focus on women's
disabilities in men's eyes leads at times to very interesting
observations that others have overlooked and salutary corrections
to usual opinions; at times it also leads to special pleading and
some ingenious sleights of hand. But this focus also makes these
plays, in my opinion, less interesting than I think they
are--less complex, less ambiguous, less challenging--not just in
respect to male-female relations (and the voicing again and again
of the unfair disparities between them) but also regarding
general social and political ideas. It lessens the important
tensions surrounding the uneasy relations between gods and
mortals (which get barely a whisper in R.'s text), to say nothing
of social interactions between kin and non-kin. While I might
not go quite as far as to say that Euripides' plays "both reveal
and disguise the system whereby men exchange women to institute
culture, which then excludes them," 21, I certainly agree with
the principle that every play can in some sense be read to
support normative gender hierarchies (and have myself argued as
much). This is the case too in plays that R. does not address,
in which, for example, brothers and sisters exhibit reciprocal
affection and whose fates are intertwined (e.g., IT) or in
which the mother's nurturant role in both family and city is
prominently featured (e.g., Phoenissae). In Euripides'
world, however, what does it mean that men are shown as far more
attached to children than elsewhere in Greek drama (e.g.,
Herakles), when it is the woman who is traditionally
called philoteknos? And if men think they may live
without women, and more abstractly, to bypass mothers in
reproducing children and to keep wives firmly in their place, the
plays show that men do so at their peril. In largest terms, R.'s
readings seem to me to obscure unnecessarily Euripides'
psychological depth and acuity, his perception of the mutual
dependencies as well as antagonisms between the sexes, and his
particularly unsettling moral sensibility that continually opens
the worlds of these plays to epistemological and ethical
uncertainties. Is our mental and emotional world the same after
having passed through the experience of a Euripidean drama? If
we find nothing but male oppression and female victimage, why
indeed read them? Why teach them?
It is one thing to take as a given that women are given by men
to men in marriage in a law of exchange that reduces women, in a
legal sense, to objects. It is quite another to translate this
truism into a valid and always applicable explanation of actual
social and psychological processes, even in dramatic texts. R.
liberally quotes Bourdieu on power relations but not his concept
of the negotiations between rule and practice and his concepts of
doxa and heterodoxy/heresy; Foucault is invoked for a
similar point about ruling strategies but not his concept that
power is constituted between and among groups, not solely as
means for enforcing victimage on the less powerful. Closer to
home, the law of the talion is a highly operative principle in
Greek thought and practice: not only does it extend to vengeance
in the execution of "justice," but it applies also to the
principle of compensation, which levels out to some extent the
potential for unlimited power of the strong over the weak. For
tragedy as a genre, its effects of pity and fear are not
cherished as consonant with male warrior values; they are
emotions that need to be inculcated as an antidote to brute
masculinity, as men undergo species of "female" experience in the
course of a play's action.
R.'s vision of Euripidean drama in the context of feminist
scholarship would have been enriched by more conversation with
the community of scholars, especially women, who have already
toiled in this vineyard and have grappled with similar problems.
While these others are mentioned in passing in the notes, often
for a brief demurral, it is odd that there is no real framing
discussion at the outset that would situate R. in these current
debates which others, such as Foley, Arthur [Katz], Loraux (and
myself) have already addressed in detail. In particular,
Loraux's more recent work, Les meres en deuil (1990) and
the collection of essays, Les experiences de Tiresias
(1989) would have been very useful for R.'s analyses, either for
agreement, refinement, or refutation.
In concluding, I would like to address two intertwined
problems: the canon, as we have it, and the purported antithesis
between feminist and Hellenist. R. seems to me to practice a
kind of feminist criticism which I would put under the rubric of
"identity politics." That is, women study literature, especially
the best-known works and authors, not just to undermine or expose
the structures of male authority in the texts, which in
the old days were mostly passed over as natural and given, and
not just to counter male authoritative control of these
texts in the normative traditions of scholarship. Women, in this
strand of feminist crticism, are also searching for role models,
for women or figures of women with whom they can identify,
especially regarding strength, power, and validation of
themselves. They seem to me less interested in the heuristic
value of gender in order to illuminate the culture they are
studying--to chart the ambiguities, subversions, play of
categories, and irreducible contradictions in cultural work.
Instead, they stop at the anguished fact that women and their
interests are continually "muted" in a system that is based on
patrilineal descent and male hegemony. There is an imagined
utopia in which women are freed from this tyranny in their own
communities, where they may author their own texts and claim
forms of cultural and social products as originary and specific
to them. But stuck as modern women are, with the texts and
culture(s) they have, apologetics are needed for perpetuating
canonical influence, even through strenuous strategies of
resistance, as if to make the best of a bad bargain.
I do not believe that this is the only mode of approach. I do
not perceive some radical split between feminist and Hellenist to
the degree that R. does (and as she claims more fully in her
introduction to the recent collection of essays, entitled
Feminist Theory and the Classics to which this is also a
partial reply). Nor do I believe that identity as a woman
places her always in opposition to male and male interests and
disqualifies her from participation in the culture she did not
"make" in her own name. What do we gain by substituting either
an imaginary "rule by women" or "women alone" to replace "rule by
men"--to promote sisterhood above personhood? Women's
communities as havens of cooperation and mutual love and support
are, I fear, very much of an illusion in many cases, sometimes
excluding other women if they do not subscribe fully to the
requisite agendas. And if women are perceived as being coopted
into heterosexual marriage and in caring for a man's (not also
her) children, what are the grounds for sharing in the human
species or how might we in turn evade the dual problems of
essentialism and constructionism in defining ourselves? These
are problems that more than one of us have contended with in our
work and teaching. Should we allow the anatomical and
psychological bases of gender identity to limit ourselves to one
set of allegiances, to constrain what we do and how we do it? A
certain insistence on the fundamental, even irreducible, aspects
of sexual difference (although how to define these is still
contested) was no doubt necessary in the early years of feminism
to establish lines of inquiry and to reorient unexamined
assumptions about the cultural, not natural, bases of society.
An adversarial stance was, and in certain circumstances, still
remains necessary and fruitful. But why, in the process, should
we concur in reinscribing ourselves in the very systems of
exclusion we have sought to escape?
This said, I worry that R.'s version of Euripidean drama will
allow some (primarily, men and conservatives) to dismiss feminist
scholarship as itself excessive and, at times, untrue to the
texts they (men) also read. It will allow others, more eager to
attune themselves to what they perceive as the latest trends,
whether for genuine or opportunistic ends, to invoke these
constructs as their authority (and authorization) for doing
likewise, complacently exhibiting their new-found sensibilities
and sympathies. On the other hand, all too often, I think,
feminist scholarship (at least, in classics) has been insulated
from meaningful critique by those who work in the field or who
are sympathetic to its aims. Women are inhibited from seeming to
break "solidarity" with other women; men are intimidated from
speaking up so as not to be labeled "just like a man." I do not
think such self-imposed censorship is helpful to the field, any
field, in the long run. It encourages patronizing winks and
tactics of dissimulation. For this reason I have attempted to
participate honestly in R's "conversation" in the spirit of open
debate. I honor the integrity and seriousness of her enterprise,
its intellectual sophistication and literary flair. It should
therefore be strongly emphasized that a good deal of her work is
illuminating and meritorious. With some caution and some
resistance on the part of the independently minded reader, there
is much to learn and much to contemplate from confronting R.'s
own resistance to facile acceptance of "what has been" as
determing what will and must always be.
NOTES
1. The evidence is now collected by A. Podlecki, "Could Women
Attend the Theater in Ancient Athens? A Collection of
Testimonia," Ancient World 21 (1990) 27-43, and women's
presence is now strongly argued by J. Henderson, "Women and the
Athenian Dramatic Festivals," TAPA 121 (1991) 133-47.
Simon Goldhill (in a piece to be published in a Festschrift for
David Lewis, which he has kindly shown me) entitled "Representing
Democracy: Women at the Great Dionysia" points again to the
weakness of the evidence and reframes the question in more
accurate socio-political terms.
2. In fact, recent psychoanalytical theory has come to a more
expansive understanding of the fetish and feminist criticism has
proposed a fetishism for women as well.
3. It should also be pointed out that nowhere in the text do we
find a negative moral judgment on Phaedra. Hippolytus refers to
her desire for sophrosune but her inability to carry it
through; Artemis in turn speaks of a "certain nobility" of spirit
(gennaiotes); it is Theseus rather whom Artemis castigates
for having acted with baseness and Aphrodite against whom Theseus
transfers the charge of wickedness.