The Play of Words (Blood Ties and Power Relations in Aeschylus' "Oresteia") || Introduction

Introduction

How I re-read the Oresteia: language, narrative andwomanhood

Lire c’est trouver des sens, et trouver des sens, c’est lesnommer […] Je nomme, je dénomme, je renomme: ainsi sepasse le texte

R. Barthes, S/Z

Aeschylus is the terror of systematizersC. J. Harington, Aeschylus

The Oresteia is the tragic story of Orestes, who murders his own mother in re-venge for his father’s assassination, and is ultimately acquitted by the court ofAthens. In order to understand the dynamics of violence and power involvedin the story of Orestes, we need to look at the complex characterisation of Cly-temnestra as mother, wife and queen in the trilogy. Critics, starting from Simonede Beauvoir (1949), continuing with Zeitlin in her influential article on misogynyin the Oresteia (1978, repr. 1984 and 1996), Goldhill (1984) and more recentlyMcClure (1997, 1999), Wohl (1998) and Foley (2001), have focused their attentionon the negative characterisation of Clytemnestra as a bad mother, an adulterouswife and a female usurper of male power, whose mind is darkened. However, theAeschylean discourse on motherhood, wifehood and power is much more artic-ulate. Undeniably, the narrative of the play is constantly concerned with the pro-jection of a negative image on Clytemnestra, and thereby we are faced with asuccessful separation of her role as mother, wife and queen: she is not a mothergiving and nurturing life, but an adulterous wife, a tyrant and a foolish female.Such a gesture of separation also implies exerting control over Clytemnestra. Therepudiation of her maternal role works as the crucial step in the trilogy towards:– the definition of bloodlines as paternal (the father is the only genetic pa-

rent);– the definition of motherhood as socially contingent (mother = the wife of the

children’s father);– the authorisation of Agamemnon’s power in the family and in society (gen-

itor, husband, head of the family, king, warrior), in order to justify matricide.

This discourse of separation and control over Clytemnestra’s role as mother, wifeand queen allows us to agree with Seidensticker (1995: 156) that ‘the power andauthority of men, in polis and oikos, remain essentially unquestioned in drama’.Yet, this statement might be applied only with some reservations to the Oresteia.

Brought to you by | New York University Elmer Holmes Bobst LibraryAuthenticated | 10.248.254.158

Download Date | 9/14/14 4:49 PM

In fact, the Aeschylean play exposes the limits of this very discourse of separa-tion, by means of a narrative that confronts us with the characters’ and the cho-rus’ constant failure to suppress Clytemnestra’s role as a mother giving and nur-turing life, and to characterise her as a bad wife, a tyrant and a foolish woman.¹

In performing this failure, the play’s discourse on inter-familial violence introdu-ces a question both on kinship relations (is kinship maternal and/or paternal?)and on power relations (is the authorisation of power feminine and/or mascu-line?). These questions jeopardize the very condition of the possibility of politics,i.e. of a communal life together in the family and in society according to the au-thority of the law of the Father.

Thus, my contention is that a re-reading of the Oresteia is required, for thefollowing reasons.² First, in my interpretation, we can assume that the play per-forms a gesture of separation in regard to Clytemnestra’s female roles, withoutsuggesting any definitive answer to the questions it raises. Second, we canargue that the trilogy is not an assertive and normative text, simply respondingto the question ‘Is it true that Clytemnestra either is or is not a mother giving life,and therefore a bad wife and usurper of male power?’. Quite the contrary, as Ihope to show, the Aeschylean play unfolds as a text, which asks to be read inconnection to the related question ‘Who is Clytemnestra, i.e. is she a mother giv-ing and nurturing life, and therefore a bad wife and an usurper of male power?’.

The difficult task of defining who Clytemnestra is affects the way in whichwe interpret Orestes’ position in the family and in society. The question ‘Whois Clytemnestra?’ fundamentally implies the question ‘Who is Orestes?’, pushingus to ask ourselves to what degree the Oresteia is a paradigmatic text. Indeed, if

Following Goldhill (1990: esp. p. 108) on Barthes, I use ‘character’ as ‘fictional figure’, on theassumption that we can account ‘person’ and ‘figure’ as two fundamentally different concepts:while a figure is devoid of any inner life, a person is not. Through language, a figure constructs adiscourse that is part of the play and its narrative. On characters in a play as lacking an innerlife, cf. also Griffith (1999: 37–38). On Griffith, cf. Easterling and Budelmann (2010: 290). Oncharacters and discourse, cf. below n. 6. The emphasis on reading the Oresteia might raise the objection that the play was written forthe performance on stage. However, by exploring the complexities of Aeschylean language andthe related discourse on Clytemnestra’s wifehood and motherhood, my study approaches theOresteia as a written text, and, following Goldhill (1986: 284), assumes that ‘performance doesnot efface the textuality of drama’. Moreover, one might note that a performance is a text; on thispoint, cf. Goldhill (1993). On the performative dimension of Greek tragedy, cf. e.g. the ground-breaking book of Taplin (1978); Sider (1978); Easterling (1997); Gould (2001: 174–202); Goldhill(2007); Ley (2007); Avezzù (2009). Especially for Agamemnon and Choephoroi, cf. Di Benedetto(1989: 76–101); Hardwick (2005); Fusillo (2005); Goward (2005: 24–42); for Eumenides, Jouanna(2009).

2 Introduction



we are not in the position to determine whether Clytemnestra either is or is not amother giving life, a good/bad wife and usurper of male power, we cannot evensay if Orestes is or is not her son and therefore that he is or is not just the son ofhis father and his legitimate heir, and, finally, that power is or is not strictlymale.Therefore, as Aeschylus re-writes Homer, the tragic poet turns the story of Orestesinto a question, and precisely into a question about origins and belonging. Thisis akin to saying that, in Aeschylus, Orestes no longer has a paradigmatic func-tion as he does in Homer; and not just because of the matricide, but because hisvery identity is put into question. That is to say: Orestes becomes a tragic char-acter in Aeschylus as he stops being unequivocally the son of the father, i.e. themale subject of power. Again, in the case of Clytemnestra (as with Orestes), theAeschylean text displays itself as a set of questions:1) in regard to Orestes’ position in the Atreid family: is it the case that Orestes is

linked to his family through paternal bloodline and/or through a blood con-nection with his mother?

2) in regard to Orestes’ position in society: is the validation of Orestes’ power asthe legitimate son and heir of his father successful? Is it the case that theauthority of male power has to exclude/include maternal (and) femalepower?

According to these questions I pose to the Aeschylean text, this book problem-atises the play’s discourse on Clytemnestra’s and Orestes’ position in the familyand society, reading the play’s narrative about interfamilial violence and matri-cide as a narrative of uncertainties on the origins of birth and power. Thus, mystudy on the Oresteiamight help ‘revalue the place of blood in politics, to rethinkwhat blood means for patriarchal thought’.³ This is the fundamental reason whyI explore the play’s discourse on blood ties and power relations as the privilegedway to explain the dynamics of violence hunting the Atreid family. Accordingly, Iexplore the characters’ rhetoric of appropriation of keywords such as τρέφειν,τίκτειν, φίλος, ἐχθρός, ἔρνος, ὠδίς, μήτηρ, πατήρ, αἷμα (words related to thesphere of blood ties) and δίκη, τέλος, ἀνήρ, γυνή, σωφρονεῖν (words relatedto the sphere of power relations). In particular, I shall discuss:1) how in Agamemnon, Choephoroi and Eumenides the characters’ and the cho-

rus’ appropriation of the above mentioned keywords constructs a negativeimage of Clytemnestra as non-mother, bad wife and tyrant, giving shapeto a narrative of acceptance of the male origins of birth and power;

Quote from Goldhill on Antigone (2012: 234).

How I re-read the Oresteia: language, narrative and womanhood 3



2) how, at the same time, the characters’ and the chorus’ appropriation of thosesame keywords does not have the power to construct an authoritative dis-course on Clytemnestra as non-mother, bad wife and female usurper ofmale power and therefore unfolds a narrative of doubt and hesitation onthe male origins of birth and power.⁴

This discussion produces several considerations about how we commonly han-dle the tragic language of the Oresteia. To begin with, the language of the Ore-steia is not simply a means of self-representation, permanently stressing the fail-ure in communication, which leads to conflict; and the characters do notunambiguously appropriate keywords for themselves, while remaining irrecon-cilable as to the usage by other dramatis personae (as we would say accordingto Vernant on tragic language).⁵ It does much more than that. The language ofthe Oresteia performs the difficult process of establishing the authority of a dis-course on womanhood through the characters’ rhetoric of appropriation of key-words. Therefore, as I intend to show, we can argue that:1) it stages a constant failure in the process of making a decision about women

as characters in the play;2) it also stages, in turn, the reader’s constant failure to take a position on this

characters’ failure in decision-making.

In this sense, the language of the Oresteia accomplishes two different things. Myfirst point concerns the act of decision-making as characters in the play. The lan-guage of the Oresteia shows that every male deliberative action is exposed to thedanger of failing, since there is no decision-making without a discourse that jus-

The expression ‘a narrative of doubt and hesitation’ is Prof. Goldhill’s, from the lecture ‘TheNarrative of the Chorus’, Cambridge 17. 10. 10. Cf.Vernant (1977: 35): ‘Les mots échangés sur l’espace scénique ont moins alors pour fonctiond’établir la communication entre les divers personnages que de marquer les blocages, les bar-rières, l’imperméabilité des esprits, de cerner le points de conflit. Pour chaque protagoniste,enfermé dans l’univers qui lui est propre, le vocabulaire utilisé reste dans sa plus grande partieopaque; il a un sens et un seul. A cette unilatéralité se heurte violemment une autre unilaté-ralité’ (italics mine). On the characters’ various usage of language as the central theme of theOresteia, cf. notably Goldhill (1986: 3): ‘It is the way in which what one does with words becomesa thematic consideration of the Oresteia that makes this trilogy a “drama of logos’’ ’; Goldhill(1997a: 136– 150; esp. pp. 136– 141 for the Oresteia).

4 Introduction



tifies it, and no discourse without the violence inherent in the use of language.⁶This implies:1) that tragic violence against female characters in the Oresteia begins with

and fails through language;2) that the trilogy, in all three plays, is properly concerned with failure–and not

simply with the process of decision-making;⁷3) that male deliberative actions engage with the difficult process of defining

who a woman is (as mother, wife, queen), and of dealing with an acceptabledefinition. The construction of this definition marks in the Oresteia the con-dition for and the limits of male rationality.

My second point concerns the characters’ acts of making their decisions in rela-tion to the reader’s act of taking a position in the text. The language of the Ore-steia shows that it is an oversimplification to read the Oresteia following Aristo-tle’s view on tragedy. According to Aristotle, what matters in tragedy are thecharacters’ actions. This is certainly true: it is precisely actions that Agamemnonand Orestes put into question.⁸ Yet, if we simply abide by Aristotle, we forget thereader and miss the question that tragedy actually triggers for us. The languageof the play, in performing the characters’ constant failure in decision-making(and thereby the inherent undecidability), forces us, as readers, to questionour own position-taking in the text. The play and its language, in other words,cause us to take a step further into the undecidability of the text, and not, as

Following a common practice in the Humanities and Social sciences, I use ‘discourse’ in orderto refer to the way of thinking displayed by the characters through their use of language, andtherefore to the system of values and to the conduct of actions they construct as a possible truth. I argue (against a common view) that the language of the Oresteia problematises the usualAthenian practice of taking a decision in the boule rather than simply mirroring it. Cf. Hall (2010:64–65): ‘Deliberation means the entire process of giving and receiving advice, acquiring in-formation, weighing up alternatives, and decision-taking. … Its importance in terms of thedecisions made by the city is underlined by the speed with which the oligarchs who took powerin 411 ousted the democratically elected Council. … The council met almost every day (Xeno-phon, Hellenica 2.3.11), and it considered matters relating not only to the state’s finances and thescrutiny of magistrates, but the Athenian cults, festivals, navy … Greek tragedy offers a trainingin decision-making. … Aeschylean characters deliberate less than those in the other two tra-gedians’. Yet, the Oresteia contains the two loci classici of the conflict involved in decision-making, notably Agamemnon’s dilemma (Ag. 211) and Orestes’ tragic question ‘What shall I do?’(Cho. 899). Cf. Agamemnon’s dilemma in Ag. 211 and Orestes’ question ‘What shall I do?’ in Cho. 899. Cf.Aristot., Po. 1450b3–4: ‘We maintain that tragedy is primarily an imitation of action (πράξεως),and that it is mainly for the sake of the action that it imitates the personal agents (τῶν πρατ-τόντων)’. The translation of this passage is by Barnes (1984).




Vernant would say, a step back: notably, according to Vernant, the reader under-stands what the characters do not, namely the ambiguities of language and theconflict they trigger.⁹ This turns Orestes’ question ‘What shall I do?’ into our ownquestion ‘What shall I do, therefore, who am I?’, i.e. ‘How did I become what Iam?’. Accordingly, the play engages us, as readers, in a process of destabilizationof our own identity in the family and in society, and of its unity through lan-guage and actions.

Again, the play supports this interpretation. When the jury of Athens voteshalf in favour of Orestes and half against him, his acquittal constitutes a momentof acceptance of the play’s discourse on the separation of Clytemnestra’s role asmother, wife and queen: Orestes is acquitted because Clytemnestra is not hismother, but the adulterous and murderous wife of his father and king ofArgos. Yet, at the same time, the acquittal of Orestes exemplifies the failure ofthis discourse on separation (the jury is divided), causing the narrative to shiftfrom a moment of acceptance to one of doubt and hesitation: the figure ofOrestes, acquitted in dubio pro reo, symbolises the characters’ failure to instan-tiate the father or the mother as the sole origin of birth and power. So for whom,as a reader, do I actually have the power to vote? In both cases (for the mother orfor the father) Orestes will be acquitted, and one way or the other we will still behaunted by the shadow of the voices against or for Orestes, questioning our po-sition in the text and, accordingly, what we might say in support of our position,and what we think we are because of this position.¹⁰ This is how the story ofOrestes becomes our own story, and how this story, against Aristotle’s interpre-tation of Greek tragedy, can hardly be read without the way of being (ποιότης) ofits reader, understood precisely as our own history of reading and, accordingly,as our own story of permanent difficulty to establish who we are as subjects inthe family and in society.¹¹ So, when Aeschylus re-writes Homer, turning Orestes’

Cf. Vernant (1977: 36): ‘C’est seulement pour le spectateur que le langage du texte peut êtretransparent à tous ses niveaux, dans sa polyvalence et ses ambiguïtés. … Le langage lui devienttransparent, le message tragique communicable dans la mesure seulement où il fait la décou-verte de l’ambiguïté des mots, des valeurs, de l’homme, où il reconnaît l’univers comme con-flictuel et où, abandonnant ses certitudes anciennes, s’ouvrant à une vision problématique dumonde, il se fait lui-même, à travers le spectacle, conscience tragique’. Cf. Goldhill (1984a: 174): ‘the Oresteia, a play which not only dramatises a failing search for adefined τέλος … but which also dramatises the very act of interpretation as blocked, in error, aseries of méconnaissances’. On the story of Orestes becoming our own story, cf. Barthes (1970: 184): ‘Tel le discours: s’ilproduit des personnages, ce n’est pas pour les faire jouer entre eux devant nous, c’est pour joueravec eux’. On Aristotle’s ποιότης and Greek tragedy, cf. Hardy’s translation of Poetics, 1450a15–18: ‘La plus importante de ces parties est l’assemblage des actions accomplies, car la tragédie

6 Introduction



story into a question, the tragic play passes this question on to his reader. Hence,in reading the Oresteia I chose to adopt the position of a ‘resisting reader’ (Fet-terly), in the hope to escape the tyranny of what Goldhill (with Barthes) calls the‘critical level’.¹²

What I have said in regard to the language of the characters can be appliedto the language of the chorus as well. Since the chorus brings the dramaticmovement from a narrative of acceptance to one of doubt and hesitation con-cerning Clytemnestra’s motherhood, wifehood and female power, the languageof the chorus neither comments on the staged events as an idealized spectator(according to German Idealism, notably Schlegel), nor it represents a frightenedspectator, somehow aware of the opaque nature of language and of its dangers(according to Vernant).¹³ Rather, the chorus is involved in the narrative construc-tion of the play, along with the characters. Its language, like that of the charac-ters, thereby forces us as readers to take a failing position within the text. It is inthe performance of this dramatic exchange between characters, chorus and read-er that the language of the play writes and re-writes its own narrative. Thus, Iwould expand upon Goldhill’s idea that we cannot understand the play if wedo not understand the narrative of the chorus, suggesting that we cannot under-stand the play if we do not understand the verbal exchange in the play perform-ing both the characters’ and the chorus’ failure to make a decision, and the read-er’s failure to take a position within the text itself.¹⁴

In relation to the play’s discourse on motherhood, wifehood and power re-lations in the family and society, my analysis of Orestes’ story of violence followsthe chronological order of the trilogy. I have accordingly divided this book intothree chapters. In the chapter on Agamemnon (1), I look at the characters’ rhet-oric of motherhood and wifehood, focusing on the narrative of Iphigeneia’s sac-rifice and on Clytemnestra’s characterisation as a queen. In the chapter on Choe-phoroi (2), I investigate the play’s discourse on motherhood, wifehood, power

imite non pas les hommes mais une action et la vie … et la fin de la vie est une certaine manièred’agir, non une manière d’être (ποιότης)’ (italics are mine). Cf. Fetterly (1978: xxii); LSN: 4: ‘Hence both my questioning of the textual critics in theirprescriptive readings, their assumption of the corrupt and to-be-corrected text, and also myquestioning of the literary critics who “slipping the universal passkey into all lacunae of si-gnification”, find “a critical level is established, the work is closed, the language by which thesemantic transformation is ended becomes nature, truth, the work’s secret” ’. Cf.Vernant (1977: 35–36): ‘Le chœur, le plus souvent, hésite et oscille, rejeté successivementd’un sens vers un autre, ou parfois pressentant obscurément une signification demeurée encoresecrète, ou la formulant, sans le savoir, par un jeu de mots, une expression à double sens’. Prof. Simon Goldhill discussed this idea in his lecture ‘The Narrative of the Chorus’, Cam-bridge 17. 10. 10.




relations in family and society, looking at Orestes’ matricide and Clytemnestra’scharacterisation as a tyrant. In the chapter on Eumenides (3), I examine the dis-course on motherhood, wifehood and, again, familial and societal power rela-tions at work in Orestes’ trial.

Finally, some notes on the terminology. Speaking of Clytemnestra as ‘mothergiving life’ and as ‘mother nurturing life’, I assume that there is a difference be-tween the sexes and that this difference consists precisely in the exclusive powerof a woman to conceive and to maintain life in utero, through her blood.¹⁵ Thisdoes not assume an essentialist position on women, whereby a woman becomesa woman only through pregnancy and marriage. Instead, this is to say that cul-turally constructed gender distinctions are based on sex, and that the law of theFather consists in, and is made possible by a) the social acceptance of marriageand the definition of the mother as wife and female procreator for the Father, b)the social acceptance of the sexual, reproductive and economic exploitation ofthe female body.¹⁶ By maintaining that cultural womanhood cannot be separatedfrom biological womanhood, I differ from those scholars who, as they speakabout politics of menstruation, neglect the fact that its social meanings tendto undermine the power of female biology.¹⁷ For this reason, I also differ fromButler (2000, ch. 1), whose criticism of Irigaray’s concept of the maternal neverspeaks of the mother, her body and its relation with maternal thinking or think-ing through the body.¹⁸ Finally, I assume that the gender studies on the feminineand the female character of Clytemnestra, since they neglect the maternal di-mension of Clytemnestra as a mother giving life, cannot be regarded as feminist:by neglecting her maternal body, they construct motherhood according to thepatriarchal view of the mother figure as a projection of male identity, i.e. asthe wife of the father for whom she has borne children.¹⁹

Furthermore, I refer to the parental role of Clytemnestra and Agamemnonwith the following terminology: genitor and genitrix term the social role of thefather and the mother, as according to the classical definition of Barnes (1973:

Cf. Gianini Benotti (1972); Rich (1977); Trebilcot (1983); Fouque (1994); Demichel (1994);Heritier (1996); Irigaray (2000); Lipperini (2007). Cf. Skultans (1970); Brownmiller (1975); Dworkin (1981); Dally (1982); Ehrenreich (1983);Fraser (1989); Weinbaum (1994), with further bibliography; Cheah and Grosz (1998), in theirinterview with Butler; Mclanahan and Percheski (2008). Cf. for instance Laws (1990). On the mother’s body and its relation to maternal thinking or thinking through the body, cf.Gallop (1988); Irigaray (1984); Ruddick (1989); Muraro (2006). On the question whether gender studies on female characters in Athenian drama are fe-minist or not, cf. Rabinowitz (2004) and Gilhuly (2006: 5) on Rabinowitz (2004).

8 Introduction



63); genetic father terms the carnal father, as in Barnes (1973: 63); the mother giv-ing and nurturing life terms the biological mother.

The bibliography was updated to November 2013, as the book went to press.




Documents

The Play of Words (Blood Ties and Power Relations in Aeschylus' "Oresteia") || Introduction