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The Will of the Beast: Sexual Imagery in the Trachiniae

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Dorothea Wender
Dorothea Wender*
Affiliation:
Wheaton College
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Extract

The Women of Trachis — or more properly, the Girls of Trachis — looks backward to a work of Aeschylus, and forward to one of Euripides. All three, the Oresteia, the Trachiniae, the Medea, are tragedies about the sexes.

The Trachiniae reminds us of the Oresteia in the following points: Heracles, like Agamemnon, has been away for a long time, on ‘men's business’. He brings home a concubine, Iole, as Agamemnon brings Cassandra. Deianeira, like Clytemnestra, comments on the silence of the captive girl. Deianeira, like Clytemnestra, causes the death of her husband. Deianeira has a son Hyllus who, like Orestes, is loyal to his father and outraged by his father's murder. There the similarity ends. Although Heracles is not totally unlike Agamemnon, Deianeira could hardly be more different from Clytemnestra: she is feminine and passive, gentle with Iole, whose silence she understands, and she kills her husband accidentally, from love, not hatred. Hyllus, too, is different from Orestes: even when he thinks Deianeira has wilfully murdered his father, the worst treatment he can conceive for her is banishment with his curse. In the Oresteia, gods are ever-present, and appear in person on the stage to effect the happy conclusion of the trilogy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , 1974 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1974

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References

1. The best general discussions of the Trachinise that I have found are those by Kirkwood, G. M., in A Study of Sophoclean Drama (Ithaca, 1958Google Scholar) and ‘The Dramatic Unity of Sophocles Trachiniæ’ (TAPA 72, 1941, 203–211), Whitman, Cedric, Sophocles: A Study in Heroic Humanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1951),CrossRefGoogle ScholarMurray, Gilbert, ‘Heracles, “The Best of Men”’, in Greek Studies (Oxford 1946Google Scholar), Kitto, H. D. F., Poiesis (Berkeley, 1966Google Scholar), and Musurillo, Herbert, The Light and the Darkness (Leiden, 1967).Google Scholar Somewhat less helpful but still worth looking at are Adams, S. M., Sophocles the Playwright (Toronto, 1957Google Scholar), Kitto’s, Greek Tragedy, chap. X, (London, 1950),Google ScholarHoey, Thomas F., ‘Sun Symbolism in the Parodos of the Trachiniæ’ (Arethusa V, 2, 1972Google Scholar), Mason, H. A., ‘The Women of Trachis’ (Arum II, 1; 2, 1963).Google ScholarBowra, C. M., Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford 1944Google Scholar) and Waldock, A. J. A., Sophocles the Dramatist (Cambridge 1951Google Scholar) present interesting, important, well written, contumaciously wrong-headed views. I have found Jebb’s commentary (Cambridge 1892) helpful and Kamerbeek’s, J. C. (The Plays of Sophocles, vol II, Leiden, 1959Google Scholar) indispensable. Marcia Polese has given me some good ideas in conversation; I thank her.

Slater’s, PhilipThe Glory of Hera (Boston 1968Google Scholar) requires a statement all to itself. It is a fascinating, flawed book, which I find, almost in equal shares, rewarding and irritating. His analyses of Greek oedipal preoccupations, attitudes toward women, and the character of Heracles are important and often convincing. On the Trachiniæ, however, he is disappointing. Perhaps because he didn’t read the play in Greek, or because of bias -induced by his including for consideration all myths about Deianeira (e.g. that she was a ‘bellicose’ Amazon), he badly misinterprets the tone of the play; e.g. p 358, ‘Deianeira … simply duplicates Hera’; 360, ‘the self-pitying, self-justifying, pseudoreasonable, well-intentioned malevolence of Deianeira’s speech to the chorus, announcing her intention to use the Centaur’s charm, requires only a Southern or a Yiddish accent to be fully contemporary’. Thus, his hasty misreading of Sophocles leads him to neglect the sexual symbolism with which the tragedy is loaded, and which would have been right in his line.

2. For a fuller discussion of this movement, see my ‘Plato; Misogynist, Paedophile and Feminist’ (Arethusa VI, 1, 1973Google Scholar). In that article I try to demonstrate that the late fifth century interest in the Woman Question can be traced to Socrates.

3. Bowra (op. tit.), among others, disagrees. He feels that the triumphant apotheosis is obvious to the audience. Kamerbeek (op. cit.) puts down this view with much vigor.

4. ‘Hogamus higamus, Man is polygamous; Higamus hogamus, Woman is monogamous.’

I have heard this quatrain attributed to William James, but am in doubt as to the true source. Can anyone enlighten me?

5. Hoey, op. cit., p. 139.

6. Bowra makes this point succintly (p. 117): ‘Each character seems to possess in an advanced form the qualities commonly attributed to his or her sex.’

7. I don’t expect all readers to be immediately convinced of this. But I beg them to suspend judgment and read on, and see if they cannot find at least some evidence for this syndrome (and the other interpretations I put rather baldly in this paragraph) in the imagery of the tragedy. I am myself mildly opposed to psychoanalytic interpretations of literature, but in this play I find the sexual symbolism inescapable and the basic character types immediately recognizable.

8. Snakes in this play are both male (Achelous) and female (the Hydra, Echidna) . But the of line 12 seemed purely sexual, although frightening, whereas the ‘poison’ of the female snakes is emphasized, and will cause Heracles’ death. What is this female poison, by which the dead Hydra kills Nessus and Heracles? Is it jealousy? Or is it the destructive clinging of the mother? Or is it wrong to push these images too far into symbolism? My general approach is to push every repeated or stressed image as far as it will go comfortably, and then to look for confirmation in further repetitions in the text. But the Hydra’s venom is confusing.

9. Do we see here a hint that the smothering Mother is responsible for the son’s fear of sexual entanglement? If so, the destructive cycle is even more complete, for the son, then, injures (abandons, mistreats) his wife, who clings even more desperately to her son, and so on, ad infinitum.

10. Kamerbeek rightly says (180): ‘ and its cognates are key words of the play.’

11. Musurillo, op. cit. 74, is at his best in this area: ‘Thus the clothing imagery forms a single texture throughout the tragic action: the festal tunic of Heracles … the violated peplos of Deianeira, the pathetic coverlets of the master-bed, and the single covering which was to be shared both by the wife and concubine.’

12. But see note 8.

13. Jameson, Michael, ‘The Women of Trachis,’ in Sophocles II (Chicago 1957) 106.Google Scholar

14. Whitman (op. cit.) favors this view (120): ‘The scruple of speaking ill of Zeus is more the scruple of scholars than of Sophocles.’

15. Plato, Laws, VI.