Table of Contents
Preface Acknowledgments IX xxvn PART ONE : ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES
I. The Greek Mother-Son Relationship: Origins and Consequences glory_of_hera_-_chapter_1_greek_mother_son.pdf
“This seems to me to explain adequately the presence of ac tive, aggressive women in Greek tragedy. Gomme points to the great freedom of action that women have in drama, and argues that women like Jocasta and Antigone must have been modeled on contemporary women [1937, pp. 93, 96, 107]. Kitto makes the same point, observing that the women are usually more enterprising than the men—that the tragic hero ines are striking in their vigor, intelligence, vindictiveness, and uncontrollability [i960, pp. 228-29]. But while one may agree that these women had contemporary models, one need not assume that such modeling extended beyond the narrow range of the household. All that a playwright requires for drama is a vivid memory for his own childhood and family— especially Greek drama, which is most intensely concerned with intrafamilial conflict. If this were not true, one would be hard put to explain how so many of the great heterosexual dramas of Greek, Elizabethan, and modern theater could have been written by homosexual playwrights.” (10)
My first hypothesis—one which assumes a much earlier change point than that suggested by Feldman —was that the constellation derived its impetus from the gradual evolution of patriarchy [cf. Levy, n.d., p. 257], or a sudden transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. The tradition of a patriarchal conquest of a matriarchal society is an ancient one in classical scholarship—based on the evidence of early matrilineal, matrilocal, goddess-worshiping traditions being supplanted by their patriarchal counterparts [Murray, n.d., p. 56; Kitto, i960, pp. 18-23; Briffault, 1959, pp. 84-90]. In deed, some authors suggest an almost universal transition of this kind for civilized societies, and there is much supporting evidence [cf. Briffault, 1959; Campbell, 1959, pp. 315ff.; Neu mann, 1955]. This is difficult to evaluate, however, since so much is based on mythology and tradition, and the ontoge netic experience of primeval matriarchy is universal, and may provide the source of much of this tradition. For the Greeks, at any rate, the evidence is real enough. Indeed, there seem to have been several invasions at various periods by patriarchal warriors, who, one can imagine, killed the indigenous males and took the females to wife. Since in all cases the women probably not only enjoyed a higher status in the older society, but also partook of a more advanced and sophisticated culture, one might expect to find here the ideal conditions for a brittle patriarchy, an anxious and hostile relationship between the sexes, and a transferring of libido by the wife from husband to child. The repetition of this experience several times over a millennium would gradually evolve the kind of cycle I have described. (72)
II. Symbols, the Serpent, and the Oral-Narcissistic Dilemma
PART TWO : MYTHICAL DEFENSES AGAINST THE MATERNAL THREAT
III. Sexual Dominance: Zeus
IV. Masculine Antisepsis: Apollo
V. Matricide: Orestes glory_of_hera-_chapter_5_matricide.pdf
Orestes' matricide is the most fully elaborated. It has often been pointed out [cf., e.g., Bunker, 1944, p. 198; Friedman and Gassel, 1951, p. 424] that while Oedipus is the concern of only three surviving Greek tragedies, Orestes is in seven, and is treated by all three of the great dramatists. It could in fact be said that the Orestes myth was the most popular sub ject in Greek drama, and that the theme of matricide was one with which the Greeks were peculiarly preoccupied.(162)
The immediate issue of this war between the sexes is whether Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon or her own death at the hands of Orestes was the more heinous crime. A modern jury would have had difficulty in convicting Clytemnestra,3 but the Greeks were terrified of the statu esque, passionate women they portrayed so effectively— Medea, Clytemnestra, Hecuba, Alcmene—and this fear obliged them to exaggerate and punish Clytemnestra's guilt. (164)
Why, then, is Medea spared and Clytemnestra murdered for her crimes? Clytemnestra kills only her husband and his concubine, and cannot bring herself to do away with her dangerous offspring; while Medea, with far less provocation, slaughters her brother, her children, two kings, and a princess, and attempts the life of Athens' most famous hero. Does the murder of one's husband, then, outweigh all of these crimes? The answer is, of course, that it did. The marital bond was the weakest point in the Greek family, and the murderous hatred of a wife for her husband was felt to be the greatest potential danger and had therefore to be guarded against with the most rigid care and punished with the most compulsive severity. Confirmation of this idea may be found in the horror with which Greeks regarded the myth of the women of Lemnos, who murdered all their husbands and ruled the island by themselves. To modern readers this is an amusing fancy—one which, after all, ends happily with the pleasant sojourn of the Argonauts and subsequent repopulation of the island [Apol- lonius Rhodius: Argonautica i. 606-909]. Certainly it cannot compare in luridness with the cannibalistic and incestuous doings of Atreus and Thyestes, with the hideous deaths of Pentheus and Heracles, with the crimes and sufferings of Procne and Philomela, of Oedipus, Cronus, and a dozen others. But how the Greeks themselves felt about it may be judged from the following passage: But the summit and crown of all crimes is that which in Lemnos befell; A woe and a mourning it is, a shame and a spitting to tell; And he that in after time doth speak of his deadliest thought, Doth say, It is like to the deed that of old time in Lemnos was wrought [Aeschylus: The Choephori 631-34. Morshead trans.]4 (164-165)
None of the modes of response we are examining (with the possible exception of Apollo's, with which it is closely allied) will be quite so close to the classical Greek norm as this one; and there is no character in Greek mythology who seems to epitomize the fifth-century Athenian as fully as does the hero of Euripides' Orestes. Whatever kind of run-of-the-mill swashbuckler he may have been in earlier days, the dramatists molded Orestes in their own image, and with his tribulations the Athenians must have experienced an emotional empathy unmatched even in so powerful a repertory.(192)
VI. Self-Emasculation: Hephaestus
VII. Identification with the Aggressor: Dionysus 1, The Ritual
VIII. Identification with the Aggressor: Dionysus 11, The Attack in the Womb
IX. Identification with the Aggressor: Dionysus 111, The Attack on the Neonate
X. Identification with the Aggressor: Dionysus iv, The Attack on the Mature God
XI. Maternal De-Sexualization: Perseus
XII. The Multiple Defenses of Heracles