Euripides Day 4: Uncensoring Women's Voices

          The genre of tragedy hinges on opposites; it hinges upon otherness. Tragedies were performed for the body of Athenian citizens, thus male, free, and, of course, Athenians. Many tragedies, such as Trojan Women, portray groups which stand in complete antithesis to the audience: in this case, female, captive, and foreign. Perhaps this is the reason tragedies moved to pity and fear, based on Aristotelian criteria.

          Pity could be experienced due to the distancing effect obtained through the “foreignness” of the characters: the audience could see them as objects, something detached from them to feel sorry for. Yet these characters experienced sufferings that could fall upon any human being, since fate is blind to class, gender, and rank, thus representing a source of fear for the audience. Trojan Women describes a scenario which resembles the modern humanitarian crisis and depicts the feelings and grief of people, especially women, seeking sanctuary from war and from human annihilation, and the response of those who caused their displacement and are in the position to decide their fate.

“She spoke in this way while crying, and raised unabating lament.” With these words Hecuba is last depicted in the Iliad. (Hom. Il. 24.760) Grief-stricken, she weeps for the death of her son Hector, breaker of horses, accompanied by the cries of the other Trojan women. This closing scene, so emotionally charged, served as inspiration for Euripides in composing The Troades. This play represents an instance of uncensoring in a metapoetic way, since it allows the women’s lament (not fully reported in the Iliad) to be heard and, at the same time, it allows the reader to witness the process of censoring which occurs within the play. In fact, the Greeks seek to destroy the women’s identity by not listening to them and by actively commanding them to not lament. Acts of censorship at the expense of women in the tragedy are not a figment of Euripides’ imagination, but they reflect the legal discourse pertaining to women’s participation in ritual lament in 6th and 5th century Greece. The attempts to suppress women’s voices by means of laws can be viewed as legal violence. Yet, Euripides was always granted a chorus, even though he presented multiple viewpoints and controversial topics in every play. He at least tried to teach men about women’s voices needing to be heard. Democracy was invented, not perfected by the Athenians. Look how long it took to end slavery and give women the right to vote!