Posts Tagged ‘gender’

My Big Fat (Ancient) Greek Wedding

June 13, 2011

It’s been another of those mad fortnights (there’s a surprise). In addition to lecture writing, tutorial prep, and marking, last week I headed out beyond the ring road – and out of my comfort zone – to give a talk on my work at the St Leonards-Mayfield School near Tunbridge Wells. This is the second one of these I’ve done (the first was at the King’s School, Worcester), but I’m a firm believer in Widening Participation so when I came to Oxford, I immediately joined the roll of names kept by the Outreach office to give to schools at times like this.

The school was lovely and the teachers welcoming, though the occasion not what I’d expected. Usually talks get given to an after-school Classics club; this was essentially a teacher training day for staff from local schools and my slot seemed to be the plenary lecture (gulp!). Suddenly my 12-certificate, toned-down schoolgirl version of what I work on seemed inadequate – there was an extempore ramping up of the bloody, violent elements of the Iphigenia story, and a few jokes about olisboi thrown in, but nothing (hopefully) that would see me lynched by a mob of angry parents, given that some students were in the audience. It seemed to go down well, however.

Ancient marriage is a difficult subject for a 1-hour talk – there is such a diversity of practice, and also such differing perspectives depending on the source. I usually stick to the Classical evidence with a bit of Sappho and some vase-painting, and leave the question time to explore the nuances of such a fundamental social and personal ritual.

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Mars and Venus

January 12, 2011

Hmm, I appear to have done my usual thing of losing sight of my work blog while engaged in actual work…must make a New Year’s Resolution to remedy that this year…

Things have changed remarkably since my last post. I have swapped the cherry-blossom-drenched campus of Nottingham for the dreaming spires of Oxford, and am now ensconced in Corpus Christi on another year-long contract. It’s a different world here – not a work environment I’m unhappy with, but a different system (perhaps that should be ‘tradition’) for doing things that requires re-adjustment. But the students are all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and the facilities are excellent, so things are ticking along.

Differences in infrastructure – the terms are only 8 weeks long here – mean that a lot of teaching is packed into a very short space of time. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for research except in the holidays, but I’ve managed to get some stuff done. For a start, Iphigenia went off to CQ a few months back and the readers’ reports are due any day now. The Monty Python chapter finally came out, so well done to Drs Ryan and Langerwerf for their efforts in editing that volume. I’m trying to rewrite the intro for my book, and will be giving a talk in a couple of weeks on some of the methodological issues that are facing me regarding the epithalamium, which will hopefully help me get my thoughts in order about it.

(I will also be giving an outreach talk at King’s School, Worcester, this term, on marriage and marriage songs in the Greek world. I’ve helped out on a few Widening Participation projects in the past, but this will be by first time as the star turn. It’s a good step.)

In and around this, I’m now working on the second draft of an article on gendered linguistics in Lesbian lyric poetry. This arose out of work I did right at the beginning of my thesis, when I was looking at the wedding song as a ‘female’ speech genre. In the end I cut this material, as later research suggested the opposite (see previous posts).

I did, however, later use these findings for a paper at ‘Mars and Venus’, a conference on gendered speech in ancient literature (Nottingham, 2008), and am now revising the paper as a journal article.

There are problems with this approach: 1) whereas sociolinguistic researchers are usually able to draw from a large body of spoken and transcribed data, the poems of Sappho that I am working with are short, fragmentary, non-conversational lyric. Is this a valid methodology to use? I’ll get on to that… 2) Gendered linguistics have been successfully applied to dramatic texts in the past, but even these constitute a representation by male playwrights as to how they thought women spoke (or should speak). Can we access women’s speech in the ancient world any more than we can access real female experience for that period?

I would argue that yes, this is a valid approach. Building on the work of scholars who have applied this method to Athenian drama, it is possible to draw certain conclusions: even if all we can say is that female-authored lyric from archaic Lesbos did not hold to the same conventions of expression as (dramatically-represented) women in classical Athens – or indeed to many common conceptions of gendered utterance.

Even negative conclusions beg some very interesting questions: is this a result of genre, or is Sappho deliberately making a point that her words are as good as any male poet’s (mascula, Horace Ep. 1.19.28 calls her)?

But more than this, there are some positive concurrences – instances where Sappho adheres to gender stereotypes, almost as though she were deliberately constructing a feminine poetic identity. And what are these instances? Believe it or not, her wedding poems – poems composed for occasions in which male and female are very clearly delineated in order to be united, and which perhaps therefore call for an explicit display of gender difference in their commemorative songs.

The editing continues…

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Sneaky sneaky research

May 26, 2010

With apologies to Jane and Gordon for not posting in awhile…I didn’t realise I had a fan base!

Actual ‘work’ work (in the sense of research) has been on and off of late. I got a good chunk done of one paper over Christmas and some of another during the Easter break, but since then it has been non-stop marking and job applications – I hope to sneak some work in tomorrow, before the next set of exam papers come in, on the article that demands my attention most.

This discussion returns to my thesis topic of wedding songs, and looks at the 3rd Stasimon (choral ode) of Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Aulis. This song describes the marriage of mythical hero/goddess couple, Peleus and Thetis (parents of Achilles) at a moment in the play between Achilles’ decision to marry Iphigenia and save her from sacrifice, and Iphigenia’s realisation that her father Agamemnon really would rather cut her throat in exchange for fair sailing to Troy.

The epithalamial resonances in this ode are in no doubt, but my question is – how do they function here? Critics most often note the contrast between the ‘idealisation’ of the ode and the brutality of the rest of the play. My argument is that the ode isn’t that idealistic – it makes full use of the ironic/foreboding element present in the Greek wedding song to in fact tie the mythical past even more closely to the violent present.

There are linguistic and thematic parallels with Sappho’s wedding narrative of Hector and Andromache (fr. 44), but the Sapphic song can be seen to refer poignantly to the Iliad - in Hector’s death (explicitly connected with his wedding by Homer) and the recovery of his body. So the ‘idealism’ lent by the Sapphic intertext is undermined by that very intertext. Euripides, I argue, employs his own set of Homeric allusions – the foreshadowing of Thetis’ gift of arms to her son at the end of the antistrophe refers directly to that scene in Iliad 18. Even the language is the same.

The scene in the Iliad means that Achilles will re-enter the battle, kill Hector, and die trying to enter Troy. By referring to it here, Euripides predicts the hero’s glory and tragedy – a fate that will itself doom Iphigenia to death. Moreover, if the Euripidean song about Thetis’ wedding refers to Iliad 18, it is probably also meant to recall Thetis’ 1st-person narrative of that marriage in that book – not a joyous occasion blessed by the gods, but a humiliating rape inflicted upon her by those same gods.

There is certainly an ironic contrast present in this ode, but I would stress the ‘ironic’ aspect of that contrast. The Homeric, and even Sapphic, allusions undermine any picture of idealisation the ode presents us with at first glance. By using a polyvalent genre such as the epithalamium, whose double-meanings are culturally ingrained, Euripides produces a song with violent undertones that cannot be divorced from the action of his drama. It ensures Iphigenia will go to her death – a death whose glory is undermined by the rhetoric of the play and questioned by scholars. and if we question the glory of her death, must we also question that of Achilles, which is inextricably linked with it?

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Greek Mythology – seminar 3

December 8, 2009

Incest

Greek myth (and perhaps even more so Roman, if we read Ovid) was full of intra-familial unions. This deserves comment, as the incest taboo is one of the most fundamental in just about any society. Even before the genetic problems of such intercourse became common knowledge, children of incest appear to have been considered in some way transgressive. This seems to have been one of the areas by which myth demonstrated, by means of negative exempla, the norms of human behaviour.

One group looked at father/daughter incest, and the myth of Thyestes and Pelopia. In some sources, Thyestes raped his daughter, unaware of who she was. In others, he received an oracle that he could avenge himself on his brother Atreus if he got a son (Aegisthus) on her, and another (in Hyginus) suggests she consented to this out of a sense of duty. Even so, the story ends with her killing herself when her son’s parentage is discovered, suggesting that not even the will of the gods can override the shame of such an act.

The second group looked at mother/son unions, and the myth of Oedipus is the obvious paradigm for this. Do we believe in Freud’s Oedipus complex? And why is there so much more ancient literature on this myth than other tales of incest? Have we sanctified and valorised the mother-son bond as a result of Western Catholicism? There are interesting parallels in the primordial myths, not only of Greece, but also of other cultures – mother/son intercourse tends to be the preserve of the early gods – Oedipus seems in that respect to transgress into the divine sphere.

The last group examined brother/sister incest, with the myth of the Aeolids. The Odyssey suggests the children of Aeolus were all happily married to each other; later versions highlight Macareus and Canace’s illicit affair, Aeolus’ wrath, and her suicide. What is allowable in the world of the ‘apologoi’ is less so in other genres. But again, cf. Zeus and Hera, a model picked up by the Ptolemies in Hellenistic Egypt. Mortals should not emulate the gods – where they do so, however unwittingly, it leads to death and the subversion, rather than continuation, of the oikos.

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Greek myth 3: Heracles

October 20, 2009

Hearcles, the son of Zeus and Alcmena, seemed like a good figure with which to take the course from tales of the gods to tales of heroes, as he bridges the gap between the two. He is thus a fundamentally ambiguous character, and this is what I wanted to get across in the lecture: that his mythology isn’t all black & white, as in Disney’s ‘Hercules’ (which turned out to be most students’ main source for their knowledge of the myth). It was important, as we went through the major details of his life story, to understand the opposition we see in tales of this hero between the figure of Heracles as a culture hero/founding father and Heracles as a brutish barbarian – within the context of other ambiguities in his representation. And, as with all the myths studies in this course, it was important to look at different versions of the myth in literature and why they are privileged in different texts.

The lecture focused on Heracles’ birth, his labours, his amours, and his death. A number of paradoxes emerged, which seem central to our understanding of the hero: the son of Zeus who spends most of his life labouring as a slave; his persecution by Hera when his very name means ‘glory of Hera’; his function as both a dynastic hero and wild-man fighting monsters on the edges of civilisation; the uncertainty of his fate as chthonic hero/Olympian diety; and his hyper-masculinity vs. the issue of gender ambiguity in his myths (i.e., Omphale).

We discussed several possible interpretations of this phenomenon, but I favour Sergent’s (1987) theory: that two parallel traditions of Heracles existed, one of his ‘cultural’ exploits and one of his labours, which were then conflated (perhaps by the epic tradition?). This is consistent with other mythical cycles (e.g. the Trojan War), in which a number of unconnected myths seem to be drawn into the orbit of a famous character or event by subsequent retellings/poets. The result is a fascinating yet confusing figure, who perhaps can only be truly understood (if even then) within the context of each representation.

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Greek Myth 2: Cosmogony

October 8, 2009

Despite my terror that I wouldn’t have enough material to fill the lecture, this ran more or less to time – I’m thinking I either have to add a bit more in in future, or else try to get the ‘discussion’ elements to run for longer.

Cosmogonic myth can be a slippery concept, but examining the etymology pins it down to something manageable: kosmos (universe) + gignesthai (to be born). Hence, the myth of origins – the Biblical ‘Genesis’ also comes from this Greek root. The best-known account is Hesiod’s Theogony (birth of the gods), which explains how the universe came to be from the beginning to the present day, and it was on this account that the lecture focused.

The aim was that students would come to understand the meaning of cosmogonic myth and grasp the outline of this text, but also become aware of variant versions (i.e., the Homeric Hymns, Plato, Aristophanes), and how their different periods and genres of composition may have affected the myth represented. These questions will become especially important for the comment questions on the exam. Similarly, once the narrative came to focus on the Olympian gods, it was important to understand how & why different texts include different gods in the Olympian pantheon.

Several important elements were identified in this kind of myth: that it was ain aetiology of the universe’s creation, characterised by generational change until a supreme god ends the pattern of succession with an act of violence and cunning. That within this narrative, male and female play distinct roles (violence vs. cunning) resulting in the subordination of the female to the male; and that as the universe becomes more ordered, gods and men become increasingly separate (this relationship will be explored in more depth in the first seminar).

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My adventures in Greek literature

February 27, 2009

Hello, and welcome to my blog. My name is Toni Badnall, and I have just finished a PhD in Classics. I was viva’d in January 2009, and passed with minor corrections. I am currently making said corrections, attempting to adapt my thesis as a book, and looking for a permanent academic job while teaching variously at the University of Nottingham and in secondary schools.

I wrote my PhD on the wedding song (called ‘hymenaios’ or ‘epithalamium’) in Greek literature. I’ve always been interested in gendered readings of the ancient world and the role of women, and think it’s odd that while there is a lot of writing about ancient marriage, there’s very little writing about writing about ancient marriage. If you know what I mean.

Thus my PhD. I started with Sappho (C6th BC) and ended with Menander Rhetor (AD C3rd), and in between looked at tragedy, comedy, Hellenistic bucolic poetry, and Plutarchian philosophy.

The major things to come out of this research are:

1) An analysis of the wedding song that goes against current feminist readings. It’s often seen as a song genre associated with women – a lament by the bride or her friends for the life left behind. Yet McClure’s (2001) statement of this is based on a misreading of Athenaeus, and Wilson’s (1996) on an interpretation of Sappho that largely ignores the large number of epithalamia in which a bridegroom is mentioned/addressed. Such a large number of wedding songs are performed communally, by both sexes, articulating society’s values, that it is highly significant when this doesn’t happen (tragedy/travesty, for example) – see my point on communality in 2) below.

Just as marriage represents an essential part of gender and community interaction, so does the marriage song. It can, however, be said to be ‘gendered’ in the elements (or topoi) which are stressed by speaking voices of different sexes.

2) That marriage in the ancient world is seen as a very transitional process – a rite of passage a la Van Gennep. You have rites of separation (betrothal, pre-nuptial sacrifice, ritual bathing and adornment of bride and groom, feast in the father’s house), rites of limen or transition (public procession, accompanied by songs, to the new home), and rites of reintegration (certain rituals of acceptance upon arrival, consummation, performance of songs, gift-giving and ceremonial unveiling, etc). The most obvious transition is that the bride processes from girlhood to womanhood in the course of the rites, but they also involve both households and indeed the whole community – which is reproduced by the production of legitimate citizen children by the new couple.

This means that marriage is a far more public ritual than modern scholarship currently assumes.

3) Within this ritual, there is an idealised representation of how the ‘transition’ should take place – and this is through love. Something we take for granted in modern marriage, but cannot be assumed for societies with an arranged-marriage norm. We tend to see ancient marriage as hierarchical, in which the woman has no say and must submit. There’s an aspect of this in wedding poetry, but by far the emphasis is on beauty and seduction – sexual initiation through persuasion rather than force. The gods Aphrodite, Eros and Peitho (persuasion) play a large part, as do the Charites (Graces, which can also be translated as ‘sexual yielding’) and Muses (ensuring the ‘harmony’ of marriage?).

This means that the marriage relationship is idealised as far more mutual and reciprocal than is commonly assumed. How this related to real life is, however, another matter.

So that’s my research in a nutshell. Across the thesis, I examined how these ideas are manipulated by various authors and literary genres at various times – ‘transition’ as a literary metaphor, if you will.

Currently, I’m looking at how these ideas are expressed in the Greek novel, which will be the last chapter when the thing gets turned into a book. I’m starting to see some patterns emerging, but more on that later.

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