Song and the Solitary Self: Euripidean Women Who Resist Comfort

Abstract

ALL GREEK TRAGEDIES EXPLORE THE HUMAN RESPONSE TO MISFORTUNE. The people of myth whom Euripides selects as the focus of his plays repeatedly face the death of loved ones and suffer abandonment, exile, and betrayal. The Euripidean heroine initially responds to these situations by claiming an ownership of grief, stating that the death of her father or the abandonment by her lover or her exile in a foreign land or her imminent death are all that she can think about. She also demands that others recognize her Sufferings as real and legitimate. This ownership of suffering is expressed by a refusal to accept the sympathy or take the advice of others (often a chorus that responds to grief with platitudes) and is sung in lyrics. There is a paradox in this: the fictional woman is in a state of utter powerlessness, which is expressed not by silence, but by communication, since she nonetheless has the power to sing. The lyrical voicing of her powerlessness gives her a strange kind of control, in that Euripides' heroines act with authority when they resist the predominant expectations of how they should behave-whether that means giving in to someone else's understanding of an event, or giving up lamentation and moving forward with their lives. I have chosen to examine four of Euripides' female characters who, while singing lyrics in an exchange (amoibaion) with an interlocutor, express resistance to being comforted: Electra from her name play, as well as Hypsipyle, Alcestis, and Hermione in Andromache. Refusal to be comforted is not the only reaction that a tragic woman can have to potential comforters, but it is one which Euripides chose to convey in song. A character in Greek tragedy does not sing when she can give orders instead (for which iambic trimeters would be more appropriate), and Electra, Hypsipyle, Alcestis, and Hermione each finds herself in a situation where she is least able to give orders: slavery, exile, and near-death experiences. Yet despite the help that her interlocutors might bring, each woman refuses to connect with them, thus remaining isolated in her own private world. I have argued elsewhere that the persuasive and truth-telling songs of Euripidean women in recognition duets form an independent genre characteristic of female communication in tragedy.' Likewise, Euripidean women's songs of resistance should be read as an independent tragic genre, or at the very least, a 1 Chong-Gossard forthcoming. Laura McClure's excellent study (1999: 32-69) of in Greek drama follows Sherzer's definition of verbal genres as culturally recognized, routinized, and sometimes though not necessarily overtly marked and formalized forms and categories of discourse in use in particular communities and societies (Sherzer 1987: 98). McClure's discussion of focuses on lamentation, aischrologia, ritual song, gossip, and seductive persuasion, all of which she connects from the theater to ancient daily life. For example, she argues that Athenian