Notes from Source: This work investigates the way that Sophocles’ tragedies represent marriage. I focus particularly on the portrayal of the woman’s experience. I assume throughout that marriage is a culturally determined institution that structures Athenian society. In the first chapter, I survey a range of Greek literary, legal and philosophical texts to sketch the variety of Athenian ideologies of marriage. Particularly important is the Athenian epikleros, a woman who passes on her paternal bloodline matrilineally, by marrying her nearest male relative. I also focus on the representation of marriage as a process of alienation for the woman. I end by exploring the possibilities for female sexual subjectivity that some of these texts present. Chapter two explores the contradictory views of marriage expressed in the Trachiniae. Heracles sees marriage as a transaction between men, an example of the homosocial economy. Deianeira fails to understand this perception, and trusts in her heterosocial relations with men. This fundamental dichotomy determines Deianeira’s extreme lack of integration in marriage, which extends throughout her life. Chapter three explores Sophocles’ Electra. Both Electra and Clytemnestra are described as “alektros”, unmarried, and represent opposite extremes of non-marriage. Electra’s unmarried state takes the form of unending dedication to her paternal household, while Clytemnestra’s “non-marriage” to Aegisthus is a negation of the male subjectivity that marriage typically implies. Chapter four deals with the Antigone. Creon strives for a definition of family as a succession of men, while Antigone favors a matrilineal structure. Antigone’s marriage-to-death, therefore, creates a paradox: she finds herself caught between dedication to her paternal family and her desire to marry. Her death symbolically becomes both a marriage and a negation of marriage, and Antigone dies integrated into no society, living or dead. The final chapter, on the Oedipus Tyrannos, explores the processes of social displacement that confirm biological identity. Through marriage, Jocasta becomes a mediator who creates identity–social and biological–for others. In so doing, she creates an excess of both relationships and signification. She embodies and enables, therefore, the social misdirections that identify Oedipus as her son and Laius’ killer.

Further Notes: Book Title: The representation of marriage in Sophoclean drama ISBN: 9798208533284