Patriarchy and New Comedy in Ancient Athens and Rome: Revisiting Northrop Frye's “Mythos of Spring: Comedy”

Abstract

AbstractFew theoretical statements about comic drama and fiction can match the influence of Northrop Frye's essay, “Mythos of Spring: Comedy.” Particularly for scholars interested not only in classic comic literary forms such as stage comedy, but also in the popular forms of contemporary films as well as television sitcoms, Frye's theory continues to be useful for understanding basic structures within large quantities of examples. In this essay, I challenge Frye's model for comic art. Although a quasi-Oedipal plot dominates extant New Comedy, the model suppresses the fact that it is only one significant plot among others capable of generating variations. More importantly, when one examines plays structured by the quasi-Oedipal plot, Frye's summary – a generational struggle that ends in the son's triumph – misrepresents the material: the son's triumph is not a foregone conclusion. New Comedy's function as the symbolic womb of the Western comic tradition is thus far from unproblematic. My challenge has serious consequences, not just for those critics who have organized their analyses on it, but also for those critics who might theorize about literary and popular art forms, as well as for scholars who would write a history of comic forms in the West.