Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy - Couverture souple

Wohl, Victoria

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0292791143 ISBN 13 : 9780292791145

Editeur : University of Texas Press, 1998

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Victoria Wohl is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Ohio State University.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Texas Press
• Date d'édition: 1998
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0292791143
• ISBN 13: 9780292791145
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 332
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible