Iphigenia in Afghanistan: Notes on Women and War

Abstract

Iphigenia in Afghanistan:Notes on Women and War Paisley Rekdal (bio) "Do not destroy me before my time, for it is sweet to look upon the light, and do not force me to visit scenes below," Iphigenia begs her father, Agamemnon, having learned that he plans to sacrifice her to Artemis. The Greek ships are assembled in Aulis's harbor but are unable to sail to Troy because Artemis refuses to let the sea winds blow. One of Agamemnon's men shot and killed the goddess's sacred deer, and for payment, Artemis has now demanded a sacrifice. The sacrifice must be a young virgin, and so Agamemnon has lured his teenage daughter Iphigenia to Aulis on the pretext that she will marry Achilles. Everyone knows there will be no marriage, of course: Euripides's play is about the capitulation to one's fate and duty, which is why Iphigenia—horrified at first by her father's plan—finally relents, urging her mother, Clytemnestra, to accept her death, cheered (if that is the word) that on her "the whole of [End Page 404] mighty Hellas looks; on [her] the passage over the sea depends; on [her] the sack of Troy."1 I first read Euripides's play in college, where I was profoundly irritated by Iphigenia's low-grade filial whining. Now I see I missed something. When I read the play again today, Iphigenia no longer appears as a wilting teen who relents to her father out of selfsacrificing misogyny. I see instead a cannier girl, one who rebuffs her mother's despair and Achilles's offers of help, which Iphigenia knows will only lead to more violence among the Greeks. "All this deliverance will my death insure, and my fame for setting Hellas free will be a happy one," she insists instead to the crowd of soldiers that gape at her, stunned by her declaration. Iphigenia doesn't just consent; she claims agency through her self-sacrifice, declaring that the Greeks' future victory at Troy will also be hers, the war overwritten with her own image. In poems of war, we look first to the narratives of male soldiers, but Iphigenia reminds me that the costs and even authorship of battle are more complexly shared. Those who begin and end the story of Troy's fall with the Iliad forget the ways that Iphigenia's sacrifice both initiates the war and also casts a moral shadow over its legacy. This is something my high school Latin teacher tried to teach me the afternoon she played Michael Cacoyannis's movie Iphigenia for my senior class, how particularly enraptured she'd been by the performance of Irene Papas, who played Clytemnestra. My teacher freeze-framed the video to point out the black stare Papas shot at the Greek boats as they pulled away from Aulis's shores. "You know what comes next," my teacher said, turning to us with a raised eyebrow. I didn't. Euripides's play ends on Agamemnon wishing his [End Page 405] wife well, telling Clytemnestra that as parents "they may be counted happy," as Iphigenia now lives among the gods and goddesses. But in college I would read Aeschylus's Oresteia, which picks up where Iphigenia in Aulis and the Iliad drop off, centering on Clytemnestra's plot to murder Agamemnon in part for revenge for her daughter. And after that, their son Orestes will later not only kill his mother in order to avenge Agamemnon's murder but be tormented by the furies for it. Iphigenia in Aulis is but one moment in a complicated and brutal unfurling of war that extends from Mycenae to Troy then back again to Greece. The war abroad begets the war at home: there is no end to what Iphigenia accepts and initiates in Aulis. When I first began thinking about this essay, I'd imagined portraying Iphigenia as one of the many female victims of war—a nubile girl slaughtered to satisfy an army's blood lust—but I see it's more nuanced if I read Iphigenia's self-sacrifice as a way of allying herself with and also claiming her father's martial project. Though...