Overview

Exchanges of women between men occur regularly in Greek tragedy-and almost always with catastrophic results. Instead of cementing bonds between men, such exchanges rend them. They allow women, who should be silent objects, to become monstrous subjects, while men often end up as lifeless corpses. But why do the tragedies always represent the transferal of women as disastrous? Victoria Wohl offers an illuminating analysis of the exchange of women in Sophocles' Trachiniae, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Euripides' Alcestis. She shows how the attempts of women in these plays to become active subjects rather than passive objects of exchange inevitably fail. While these failures seem to validate male hegemony, the women's actions, however futile, blur the distinction between male subject and female object, calling into question the very nature of the tragic self. What the tragedies thus present, Wohl asserts, is not only an affirmation of Athens' reigning ideologies (including its gender hierarchy) but also the possibility of resistance to them and the imagination of alternatives.

Full Product Details

Author:   Victoria Wohl
Publisher:   University of Texas Press
Imprint:   University of Texas Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9780292791145

ISBN 10:   0292791143
Pages:   332
Publication Date:   01 January 1998
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction. Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity The Tragic Exchange Reaffirmation, Resistance, Negotiation The Social Economy of Exchange The Subject of Exchange Part One. Sovereign Father and Female Subject in Sophocles' Trachiniae One. The Noblest Law : The Paternal Symbolic and Its Reluctant Subject The Final Exchange Heracles: Subject under Siege Hyllus: The Reluctant Ephebe Two. The Foreclosed Female Subject Iole, Deianira, and the Triangle of Exchange Anti doron dota: Deianira's Gift-Giving Status and Gender A Woman's kleos Three. Alterity and Intersubjectivity Interpellation of the Other, Creation of the Self Spatial Models of Self and Other: Pandora and kalokagathia The Virgin in the Garden Part Two. The Violence of kharis In Aeschylus's Agamemnon Four. The Commodity Fetish and the Agalmatization of the Virgin Daughter Marx and the Fetishized Economy The Occluded Exchange The Agalmatization of the Virgin Daughter Five. Agalma ploutou: Accounting for Helen The Disenchantment of the agalma Khrusamoibos somaton: The Commodification of the Male Subject Six. Fear and Pity: Clytemnestra and Cassandra Androboulon kear: Clytemnestra's Transgressive Identity A Lament for the Father Part Three. Mourning and Matricide in Euripides' Alcestis Seven. The Shadow of the Object: Loss, Mourning, and Reparation Eight. Agonistic Identity and the Superlative Subject The Matriarch of the oikos and Alcestis's Domestic Politics The Superlative Subject and Her Husband From Tragedy to the Symposium Nine. The Mirror of xenia and the Paternal Symbolic From Impossible kharis to the agalma Economy From physis to praxis Heracles and the Mirror of xenia The Final Exchange Conclusion. Too Intimate Commerce Notes Bibliography General Index Index Locorum

Reviews

An important new work from the perspective of gender (rather than exclusively feminist) theory, this volume should appeal to professors and graduate students in the classics. - Choice

"""An important new work from the perspective of gender (rather than exclusively feminist) theory, this volume should appeal to professors and graduate students in the classics.""- Choice"

Author Information

Victoria Wohl is a professor of classics at the University of Toronto.

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