The Voice of the Other in Euripides' Hecuba

 

Any discussion of the representation or “play” of gender in Athenian tragedy begins with the problem of representing the Other. All roles were played by male actors, the audience was primarily male, and the poets participating in the Dionysia were male Athenian citizens. Yet Euripides in particular gave most of his lines to female mythical characters, mortal and immortal, slave and mistress alike.  Playing the Other on the Greek stage permitted an explanation and expansion of male identity: a form of initiation into the mysteries of what the culture defines as the feminine Other - the tensions, complexities, vulnerabilities, irrationalities, and ambiguities that masculine aspiration would prefer to suppress or control – tragedy imagines a fuller model for the masculine self.

Through the female voice, the voice of the Other, the playwright can explore problems that would be too risqué or too difficult to accept by an Athenian audience. In the case of Euripides’ Hecuba, the voice of the barbarian queen explores the problem in the polis with regards to the requirement of free speech for the optimal functioning of the state. According to the democratic ideal all citizens should have equal right of speech; however, those citizens who were from families who traditionally had more power also had more status and therefore had more power in the Assembly and in the law courts. This meant that „weaker‟ citizens, those with less political power, may have had the same rights in theory, but in practice their speech would not have had the same force in the public arena.

While one cannot assume that social commentators like Euripides and Aeschylus did not have an opinion on the role and rights of women in their own society, they rather used these fictional women to create a dialogue with the ruling elite, the male citizens of the polis. Euripides plays devil’s advocate by giving his female characters strident voices, unlike their everyday counterparts. But in doing so he is not so much commenting on the position of women in society as he is using these nontraditional figures to highlight masculine tensions. The female characters give voice to the things that men would not normally say, action to the things citizen men would not normally do. They challenge accepted behavior and bring to light the clashing moralities of pre-democratic manliness and democratic hyper-rationality. Rip’s female characters respond in ways no woman would have the license to, they ask dangerous and difficult questions about what it means to be good and honorable. He writes his plays about issues of morality and honor, but without making any judgments himself. He is not there to judge, only to bring to light difficult issues relating to what it means to be a good citizen in the Athenian polis.

Establishing that speech roles were strictly divided according to gender is necessary in order to illustrate the “unfeminine” behavior of the lead female character in Euripides‟ Hecuba. Her character in this play is twofold, divided by the events that shape her actions and her speech: the sacrifice of her daughter and the murder of her son. At Hecuba’s first appearance she is clearly characterized as an old woman (59-67), bowed by grief for the loss of her home and her freedom. Her fears for her children are foremost in her mind and this establishes the primary focus for Hecuba, the preservation of her family and the importance of her maternal responsibilities, emphasizing her femininity. Hecuba calls on the gods to save her precious children from harm as she is haunted by a terrifying dream that plagued her sleep (70-76). Unfortunately for Hecuba the fears from her dreams become a reality: the Chorus informs her of the army’s decision to sacrifice Polyxena at the request of Achilles ghost, and Hecuba’s words turn to lamentation (as discussed previously this was one of the few sanctioned outlets for female speech in the polis). Her cries anticipate the death and burial of Polyxena, a pre-emptive mourning, as it were, acting as a sign of more death to come. Polyxena joins in her mother’s lamentation, not for herself, but for her mother who will live on alone and enslaved while Polyxena escapes from her enslavement to the house of Hades(211-12).

Female speech by female characters is the expected norm, in this case embodied by the lamentation of the queen, Polyxena and the Trojan women of the Chorus. What would not conform to the socially prescribed speech form for a woman in Athenian society is the way in which Hecuba discards her womanly lamentation and armors herself with a rhetoric that would have been the sole purview of the Athenian male citizen. Hecuba’s shift from a feminine speech form to one associated only with the public speech of citizen men is an important signpost for the audience to indicate her shift from the acceptable gender role of grieving mother to that of a gender-inappropriate knife-wielding logician. This change is not unrealistic in the circumstances; Hecuba is simply taking on the mantle of her own kurios (head of household)  since that position is vacant due to the deaths of her male family members and Agamemnon’s refusal to fulfil that role, even though he has taken her daughter Cassandra into his household as part of his spoils of war.