| Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy Univ of Texas P Edition Contributor(s): Wohl, Victoria (Author) |
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ISBN: 0292791143 ISBN-13: 9780292791145 Publisher: University of Texas Press OUR PRICE: $32.62 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 1998 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Ancient And Classical - Literary Criticism | Drama - Drama |
| Dewey: 882.010 |
| LCCN: 97009872 |
| Lexile Measure: 1480 |
| Physical Information: 0.74" H x 5.97" W x 8.91" (1.02 lbs) 332 pages |
| Themes: - Sex & Gender - Feminine |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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 transferral 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Wohl, Victoria: - Victoria Wohl is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Ohio State University. |
