Sophocles: The Trachiniae, and tragedy under patriarchy
Sophocles’s Women of Trachis presents us with all sorts of problems, which is likely why it’s rarely performed today, even in Ezra Pound’s controversially conversational but still quite good translation. Part of this, I think, is due to the strange structure of the play: two-thirds focusing on the wife Deianira, who then snuffs herself, leaving us to watch her husband Heracles die painfully during the last third. This gives rise to a larger problem: just who is the tragic figure here? Many critics have asked this, and likely audiences do as well, although the confusion might well arise from modern biases and an inability to read ancient ones.
The first problem, probably relatively minor, is the name: the chorus, those “women of Trachis”, speak moving but relatively insignificant odes that describe the action, instead of moving it forward. We could perhaps see the play as dealing with the lot of women, which places the emphasis on Deianira; but then we return to the question of who the tragedy is about. Is it the story of a woman’s intense but misguided love for her husband? Or is it the story of a great warrior who is a lousy husband? And who would the original audience have found to be at fault between the two?
I think we find Heracles at fault. Heracles (Latin: Hercules) originally won Deianira for a wife by fighting the river Achelous for her. The son of Zeus, he is a great warrior, yet he has not settled into domestic bliss. Returning from war, he has brought with him the female slave Iolus, who is too traumatized to speak. The play’s first reversal of fortune comes in the space of twenty lines: Deianira, overjoyed at the return of her husband, discovers that Iolus is really the daughter of Eurytus, king of Oechalia. Heracles has decimated Oechalia, killed the king, and taken the daughter, with whom he is now madly in love, as his concubine. Concubinage is normal at this time; what’s destabilizing is his love for the slave, and the betrayal of his wife. In Pound’s conversational translation she says this betrayal is, “What I get for keeping house all this time,” which demonstrates both the appeal and the problems with that version.
The power of Sophocles’s play is the way it shows the rapid shifting of fate. What Sophocles seems to be illustrating is how those shifts, commonplace in times of war, threaten the stability at the heart of domestic bliss. Changes of heart can have devastating effects on marital relationships, as they do here. The tragic limitation that Deianira rages against is one that every feeling person can relate to- namely that we cannot make the other love us if they simply don’t, and we cannot make them continue loving us if they have stopped. Her desire for a love potion #9 is universal.
The instability of war also impacts life at home, a theme in several tragedies. The difficulties great warriors have retuning home create an evocative theme because they illustrate just how different war and peace are as existential states; by comparison to wartime, peace seems like a somnambulistic denial of the struggle for survival. See also: The Hurt Locker.
The problem for modern audiences is that we’re naturally a bit biased against Heracles and towards Deianira. But it’s her error that sets the tragedy in motion. Once upon a time, she was ferried across the Evenus by the centaur Nessus. Halfway across, the centaur tried to finger her and was more than rebuffed- she screamed and Heracles chivalrously shot the beast with a poisoned arrow. As he lay dying, Nessus gave her an urn of his blood, promising it would allow her to rule her husband’s heart: “Never will he look at another woman and love her more than you.”
In an inversion of the Medea story, Deianira sends Heracles a cloak steeped in the blood, hoping to make him love her again. Instead, the cloak, poisoned, causes him to sizzle and burn, the second reversal of fate and true meaning of the centaur’s promise. There’s also a sardonic parallel between the affliction of love and poisoning. Realizing her mistake and how it has doomed her, Deianira kills herself. In the last third of the play, Heracles rages against his treacherous wife: “Miss Oineus, with her pretty little shifty eyes, has done me to beat all the furies.” The last reversal: the loyal son Hyllus convinces him that it was not treachery, but her desire to win his heart, and Heracles finally realizes his wife’s devotion in the last moments of his life.
Sophocles sets the deaths up as gender-inversions: Deianira dies in a “manly” way in gutting herself, Heracles tries to hide his “womanly” lingering and whimpering death, and Hyllus becomes a man in the mercy killing of his father. Our sensibilities might confuse us because we miss what Sophocles sees as a reversal of natural order.
Perhaps the play also confuses us because we see Deianira’s error as a matter of her being deceived, rather than the sort of hubris common in tragedy. It seems to me that the tension of tragedies comes from the character wanting something that fate says they cannot have, and our unavoidable identification with their desire in spite of our own detachment. Of course Medea wants revenge against Jason. Of course Philoctetes wants to die. Of course Antigone wants to bury her brother. How could they not? But they become horrible in their refusal to accept the limitations of human life. The tragic sense is the knowledge that all men want to overcome the limitations imposed by existence- how could we not?- but in striving to be something better than human they often become something worse.
All Deianira wants is for her husband to treat her and her alone with love. But this is something she’s not entitled to, even though we assume it is the right of a spouse. I think our incomprehension comes first because it’s perhaps harder for us to condemn female jealousy than male jealousy. The jealousy of a male has an undertone of violence, while female jealousy is tied to helplessness, particularly in the time in which the play is set. Without her husband, Deianira will be at the mercy of fate. We naturally sympathize with her.
Secondly, we don’t quite recognize the limitations placed on Deianira because we do not accept patriarchy as a given. We see the impossibility of making the other love us; but we don’t recognize Deianira’s hubris in coveting the love and devotion of a husband that she’s simply not entitled to, not in a warrior-based patriarchy. We want to see Sophocles as a sort of proto-feminist because he so aptly depicts the suffering of a woman in a society in which her husband has the right to fall in love with another woman, make the other his concubine, and keep his wife around to tend to the home. Of course Deianira wants to be treated better.
But those who live in genuinely patriarchal societies don’t tend to see them as better– more just or decent- they see them as natural– as rooted in human nature in an inevitable sort of way; it couldn’t be otherwise. Deianira isn’t just raging against the insensitivity of her prick husband; she’s raging against the “natural order of things”, and as such is doomed to fail, whether we agree with that or not.
Oh, welcome back Rufus.
How I’ve missed you!Report
@Jaybird, Hey, thank you very much! I’ve been around, although posting too lightly. A bit of life/dissertation pain as of late.Report
(A warning: Rufus, you’ve finally gotten around to the one play of Sophokles I’ve read fully in the Greek.)
And there is, I think, something in this play that points out the fragility of that “natural order of things.” The chorus famously goes silent about 3/4 of the way through the play, after they learn of D’s suicide and H’s pain/dying: if you look carefully at their language, they tie him — and what D’s reaction (grief, not suicide) should be to H’s death — to the various cycles of nature. (I wrote a term paper on this, more or less; I’ll try to spare everyone the details, unless you REALLY want them.)
What I want to bring up in relation to that breaking of natural patterns of expectations is that everything still follows with what the oracles, correctly interpreted, say. This chorus does what that of Oidipous Turannos threatens to do if the oracles fail — except the oracles didn’t fail — the natural order breaks down, but the gods aren’t absent. (And here, because I don’t feel like re-phrasing it, I’ll just give the final paragraph of my paper — forgive me):
The world has not descended into anarchy. The natural cycles they had depended upon do exist—but only so long as the gods allow them to. The laws of nature, it seems, must be renewed day by day. In a way, they had already known this—what is revealed is the ease with which such interference may occur; that the gods are not content to create a cycle of nature and let it run its course. They grow bored, and certainty is impossible and knowledge overturned. It is, perhaps, a call to remember the numinous—in all its beauty and its danger—in a natural world that is felt to be increasingly explained through words that would leave it behind.
It’s important to remember, also, when speaking of the Greeks that however much their socio-political-economic orders may have seemed the “natural way of things,” they were inherently fragile — war, famine, and disease (among others) were proximate. Sophokles is getting at two (at least) things here, re: natural orders: the danger of inverting, or attempting to invert, that order; but also that even this order is fragile, dangerous — and potentially destructive.Report
@JL Wall, I’m certainly glad to have evoked this comment! Admittedly, my Greek is about kindergarten-level. My Latin’s better (although my Latin teacher advised me never to become a classicist!), and my French and Spanish are great, so long as no French or Spanish people expect any detailed responses from me!
Anyway, what do you make of the last line in the play? I wanted to talk about it, but was afraid that would be a thesis paper in itself! Pound has Hyllos say: “And all of this is from Zeus.” My other translation puts it as, “and there is nothing here that is not Zeus”. Both of them seem to suggest just what you’re talking about here.Report
Pound’s is smoother, but less literal; for a very literal but inelegant translation, I’d say, “Nothing of these things which is, is not from Zeus.” (There may be a degree of importance to beginning the line on “nothing”/kouden.)
These are also the only four lines the chorus speaks in the last 1/4 of the play — and they were important to my thesis. But there’s a question about who’s speaking — the Chorus, or Hyllus (the are, it appears, agreed to be written by Sophokles). Here’s the Cambridge edition’s commentary:
“A notorious crux. The MSS are divided over the ascription of the last lines; evidently, there was doubt already in antiquity: “The Chorus says this, or Hyllus.”* (schol.) (i) If the Chorus (or the Chorus leader) are the speakers the ending would conform to the norm . . . But some endings are probably spurious . . .” etc., for another paragraph, and then 2 pages on the meaning of the final 4 lines. The editor of this edition leans toward the Chorus as speaker; so did my professor; so do I — if for no other reason than that I think it’s a more meaningful statement that way. And I probably err on the side of over-estimating the power of a convention — such as ending on a choral statement.
Closing lines have a habit of saying things like “the gods/Zeus control all things,” at very disconcerting moments — for some of them, this is why they’re thought to be spurious (the most “famous” of these is probably at the end of the Medea). But here, I think it’s not incongruent with the play’s content — even if it’s worthy of several theses! Thematically and linguistically, there’s a major concern with natural order, which would be associated with Zeus. And he can do what he wants, natural order be damned.Report
I guess I should add that what I just wrote was “@Rufus F., “Report
@JL Wall, I think I’ve only read translations attributing the line to Hyllus, but it does give a much stronger conclusion to the play to have the line spoken by the chorus, as well as underlying the flimsiness of the natural order when in conflict with what the gods fate.Report
“Perhaps the play also confuses us because we see Deianira’s error as a matter of her being deceived…”
I’ve often heard it said that the Greeks did not make the same distinction between inclupating and non-inculpating misfortune, so that “being deceived” could as much be the basis for a tragedy as some more recognizably moral failure.Report
@David Schaengold, I think that’s right. I tried to say this with Aristotle’s famous description of tragedy- I think we’re wrong in taking him to talk about a character’s “flaw”, which sounds like a failing of character, when he probably more accurately talks about their “error”, which can just as easily be a matter of deception as personal failing.Report
@Rufus F., Do you think Shakespeare drew on that when he made Othello’s “flaw” as “prone to deception” and Hamlet’s “flaw” as the opposite? In the case of both of those early-modern tragedies, this theme seems to be fully developed and reconciled. Or was it just some coincidence that Shakespeare’s characterization seems to satsify both definitions?Report
@Christopher Carr, It’s been so long since I’ve read either that I’d have to go back to the plays- no great pain there. It did always seem to me that Hamlet’s problem was just this- all too much awareness. But I’ve never tried reading them together. It might be an interesting exercize.Report