Skip to product information
1 of 1

University of Texas Press

Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy

Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy

Regular price $62.17 USD
Regular price Sale price $62.17 USD
Sale Sold out
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Format

Exchanges of women between men occur regularly in Greek tragedy-and almost always with catastrophic results. Instead of cementing bonds between men, such exchanges rend them. They allow women, who should be silent objects, to become monstrous subjects, while men often end up as lifeless corpses. But why do the tragedies always represent the transferal of women as disastrous?

Victoria Wohl offers an illuminating analysis of the exchange of women in Sophocles' Trachiniae, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, and Euripides' Alcestis. She shows how the attempts of women in these plays to become active subjects rather than passive objects of exchange inevitably fail. While these failures seem to validate male hegemony, the women's actions, however futile, blur the distinction between male subject and female object, calling into question the very nature of the tragic self. What the tragedies thus present, Wohl asserts, is not only an affirmation of Athens' reigning ideologies (including its gender hierarchy) but also the possibility of resistance to them and the imagination of alternatives.

Author: Victoria Wohl
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 01/01/1998
Pages: 332
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 8.91h x 5.97w x 0.74d
ISBN: 9780292791145

About the Author

Victoria Wohl is a professor of classics at the University of Toronto.


View full details