From The Archives 12: Gender Roles in Greek Drama

For some reason, I've always been drawn to the story of Electra. I remember finding her name in my encyclopedia of Greek mythology (yes I have one, I have an entire section of my personal library dedicated to Greek stuff), reading that her name meant amber because of the color of her eyes, and I've never forgotten her. And I really don't understand why she's stuck with me for so long, because she has a terrible story. In fact, I have a draft blog post from 2015, if not earlier, detailing her story, because I've always felt the need to bring some light on her story. So when I got to read three different drama versions of her story for Ancient Greek Drama class, I was stoked. And of course, I wrote about her. I also got to perform as a chorus member in Antigone with that class, so I had lots of fun with that class (even though I had strep the week of our performances). Carl Shaw, another great professor!

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May 2017

            Ancient Greek Drama was a playground for altered gender roles. Athenian women were not considered citizens, and most women did not have a lot of power, especially in comparison to modern day women, but the use of gender within Greek plays often took views or assumptions of a certain gender placed on the other. Female characters in particular dealt with the conflict of having the gender roles and expectations of Greek women of that time but while being in complicated situations that lead them to acting in ways that are characteristically male. This paper will take into consideration female characters from plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. While not all three of them interacted together, all of their plays were written between 500 and 400 BCE. I will argue that these female characters do take on male characteristics, but at the cost of their humanity and womanness, or by turning them into the damsel in distress. 

            The name of Electra is hugely intertwined with gender starting with the psychological “Electra Complex” that lies in comparison to the Oedipus Complex” to the multiple plays about Electra written BCE and still exist now. Her story contains her mother’s assassination of her father after her sister’s death, and her response to kill her mother with her brother’s help. The sibling relationship of Electra and Orestes varies per author in how much of the murder Electra initiates, and how much he takes part in. 

            Euripides’ version of Electra places Electra in a slightly different setting by showing her married to a peasant outside of the castle. She constantly laments her position and fulfills the damsel in distress trope afraid of her brother when he surprises her as a stranger and subservient to her husband in discussion. When it comes to the heart of her situation, she becomes blood thirsty and vengeful. There is nothing more that she would like than the death of her mother, and she is willing to do whatever necessary in order to carry that out. She claims multiple times that she would kill her mother herself, and it is not an empty claim. She’ll go back and forth between acting like the girl in anguish to a vengeful harbinger of death. Whenever her brother is uncertain, she pushes him towards violence. Electra has no misgivings towards manipulating others in order to achieve her goal and speaks of murder matter-of-factly. Then when the time comes, she takes part in the murder of her mother, but later bemoans that because of it she won’t find a suitable husband.

            Vengeance and murder are seen as male pursuits, particularly because the men are the protectors and soldiers. Electra takes these aims as her own in anger at her mother for killing her father, but flip flops between being angry and bent on revenge to being weepy and deploring over her fate in relation to marriage. Becoming an active participant in her own life doesn’t embolden Electra to becoming more independent or able, but just leads her to feel more deserving of having a husband of a higher class. 

            Less of a distraught damsel and even more the seed of vengeful thought is Sophocles’ Electra. In this version Electra has a second sister who lives and pleads with her not to go forth with killing their mother. When Orestes comes, Electra uses him to make the murders happen, and convinces him of the need to do it every time he falters. She cares about whether her brother is living or dead because she sees him as the only true ally in their matricide. She traps her mother for death and while she doesn’t take part in the killing, she gives encouragements to Orestes as it happens. After it is done, she ensures the Aegisthus, her mother’s lover, follows in the same way, and when he begs for mercy, Electra hastens Orestes to kill him, going so far to request to “Kill him at once… and then throw out his corpse for the dogs and birds.” The play ends with Electra’s contentment over the successful murders, and while she wasn’t the one with a weapon in hand, she was the driving force throughout the entire play. 

This version of Electra is strong willed and confident of her decisions, but her person can be mostly summed up by her anger. Rather than becoming an independent person changing the characteristics of her life, all that matters is their deaths for her freedom. Besides her need for vengeance, she doesn’t have much of a personality or characteristics that make her a normal person. 

Sophocles’ version of Electra is also compared to her mother Clytemnestra a lot more than the other versions. This is for good reason, because her vengeance mirrors her own mother’s actions when Clytemnestra killed her husband as he returned from the Trojan War. Electra pretty much becomes Clytemnestra, and the comparison is shown early on during Electra’s monologue. In her monologue she mentions a nightingale, which is representative of her mother, and also calls upon the furies, which is what Clytemnestra does in Aeschylus’ version of Electra. 

            Clytemnestra makes a grand effort to change her life in a way that makes her happier, but then makes her into the villain. It could be viewed in a positive light, because Clytemnestra changes her life from an unhappy marriage where her husband killed her oldest daughter, to ruling the kingdom with someone she loves. And yet, Clytemnestra does so through murder. 

In Aeschylus’ version, Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon and his priestess Cassandra with the help of her lover Aegisthus as the chorus questions and warns her about the consequences of her murders. Clytemnestra ignores their advice and argues for her cause, without pausing from fulfilling it. She then advises Aegisthus to disregard the chorus so they can live their life. At this point, she seems fairly reasonable, if you can accept that she killed in revenge for her daughter’s death. But, when Orestes and Electra return the favor and kill her, she curses Orestes and as a ghost, sends the furies after him. If perhaps she could be forgiven after trying to have a normal life after killing her husband, then that forgiveness must be taken away when she curses her child for a similar response to death. Somehow Clytemnestra doesn’t realize that children learn from their parents, and so it should come no surprise to her that if she kills to solve an issue, that her children would do the same. 

By cursing her child, she continues the vicious cycle and becomes even more of the villain. As she ends up as a ghost, her humanity is completely taken away from her and she becomes simply an evil spirit. Not only does she not act in a humane way any, but also she isn’t physically a human anymore. The “male” characteristics she took on when taking charge of her life, fighting back against her husband killing their daughter, and living with the person she actually loves are exaggerated to the point that she becomes the evil villainous ghost woman, rather than just a woman bending the gender roles of her time.

In the same works by Aeschylus, Athena plays an important part in deciding justice after Orestes is cursed. Athena is arguably one of the most powerful goddesses because she is the goddess of wisdom and strategic war. However, while being strong and talented and having a virtue like wisdom as her main characteristic, she loses her femininity by being a desexualized motherless virgin without any strong relationships to other women. Her origin story consists of her father swallowing her pregnant mother in fear that he would have a son that could best him, and then birthing Athena himself, making her less of a woman and more like a man in every way except for physically.

While acting as the decider of justice between Orestes and his mother in the play, Athena maintains that she is an impartial judgment of the facts. She brings in a tribunal to make the decision because she can’t decide, but they come up with a tie, so she ends up having to make the decision herself. While the leader’s argument hinges upon the murder, Apollo’s defense of Orestes bears on the significance of his view as a god and the importance of fathers more than mothers, which is a very weak defense, especially looking at parenthood from a modern perspective. Apollo completely disregards the value of the mother in birthing and raising a child. When it comes back for Athena to make the decision again as to who is in the right, she admits, “No mother gave me birth. I honour the male in all things but marriage” and decides that with a tie, Orestes would win. She manages to be contain male characteristics to the point that does not identify or connect with the idea of womanhood, but in the situation of marriage, still agrees with being subservient while also being unmarried. 

Medea’s story is the ultimate story of revenge against being scorn in love after marriage. When they met, Medea sacrificed her relationship with her family and her people, as well as killed her brother in order to help Jason. She originally abides to the female gender roles, and when she finds out that Jason is leaving her to marry another woman, she hides in her room and laments. But then she takes action and poisons Jason’s bride, killing her before she also kills her own children, thus ending her bloodline and escaping to Athens. From perfect wife to killer of her own children, Medea took quite a turn. It is satisfying that Jason does not get away with leaving Medea after he found a better princess to marry, but his punishment for that lead to a lot of deaths that weren’t his. She kills and takes her children so that he cannot have them, and cannot have the royal family and mistress family that he’d like, but the children could do nothing in this situation, and were completely innocent.

Medea’s interactions with gender roles are fascinating, and the chorus predicts that someday “womankind will be honored. No longer will ill-sounding report attach to our sex,” but Medea does not become a feminist champion. She, like many other women in these plays, kept to the female gender roles until she took action, and then retaliated against those roles in such an overblown manner that she becomes an example of an evil vengeful being thought of more as a sorceress than as a human woman.

Becoming an evil otherworldly being or being a damsel in distress seems like the main two routes for ancient Greek women when they want to rebel against the gender roles assumed for them. Athena is unique in that she is already not a human, but a goddess, and even she is unable to reconcile womanhood with male gender roles. It is important that these writers were able to create female characters that played major parts within their myths, and weren’t simply important for being beautiful and married off to the hero. However, the effect of the gender roles of the time must be considered because of how they led these characters to make the decisions that they did. While they may have been shocking at the time, with modern eyes, these women continue to fall into a select few different tropes every time they rebel against the expectations of their gender.