Quiz Two Postponed to Thu 24-Oct

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Accessing Ladies' Day

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Journal Entries

Does gender and/or sexuality appear performed in the play? Does the play validate/undermine the position of a Butler or a Foucault in any way? Explain. . . .

Background

Production Facts

• Composed by Aristophanes, comic playwright (lived c. 450-c. 386 BCE), Athenian. Its Greek title (also translated as Ladies' Day or Celebrating Ladies) is Thesmophoriazousai: "Women celebrating the Thesmophoria"
• Produced at Athens, March, 411 BCE, a few months after the Lysistrata
• Political situation: The war against Sparta (the "Peloponnesian War," 431-404 BCE) is going rather poorly at this point; the democracy is under the watch of a board of "supervisors" or "commissioners" (probouloi)

Dramatic Facts

• Setting: Athens, 1st at the house of Agathon (a tragic playwright), then at the Thesmophorion (temple of Demeter)
• Time: The "now" of the production date (411 BCE)
• Situation: The freeborn citizen women of Athens are taking advantage of a women's holiday, the Thesmophoria, to meet and plot against their arch enemy, Euripides. Euripides is determined to thwart the conspiracy. How? Mnesilochos, Euripides' brother-in-law, will attend the meeting disguised as a woman (no men are permitted to attend the Thesmophoria). His job will be to talk the women out of any rash action. Euripides brings Mnesilochos to the house of Agathon, another tragic playwright. (We have already met Agathon, a real person, in Plato's Symposium.) Agathon lives and dresses like a woman, and so will supply Mnesilochos with the clothes he needs.
  
  Other characters include women attending the Thesmophoria (the chorus and individual speakers) and Cleisthenes, a man whose feminine traits gain him admission to the festivity. (Cleisthenes, notorious for an alleged instance of military desertion, was a favorite target of Aristophanes' satire.)

Further Note: the Thesmophoria

This was a special holiday, celebrated by women, but for the benefit of the entire city. It honored Demeter, goddess of the grain, thus a sort of earth-mother and fertility goddess, and a deity regarded as essential to the well-being of Athens because it was she who provided the city with food. The Thesmophoria, celebrated at a temple known as the Thesmophorion, involved some rather unusual rituals.

More will be said in class about the festival; for now, it is important not to forget that the Thesmophoria constituted a festival from which men were STRICTLY EXCLUDED. Further, the festival seems to have possessed an organizational dimension paralleling to some degree the political organization of the city — election of officers, etc. Thus women, whose main area of responsibility was INSIDE the house (especially in the case of wealthier women), had this as an area of responsibility (and independence?) OUTSIDE the house.

Ladies' Day Study Questions

As you read, TAKE NOTES on, and prepare to discuss, the following:

1. Does this play involve/arouse resistance internal to the text or external to it, or both?
   
   
   • Is the play so invested in misogynistic patriarchy that all resistance must happen outside it — is the play itself (never mind Euripides) misogynistic?
   • Or dDo signs of resistance ever show through the text's overtly misogynistic surface? Are aspects of the play anti-misogynistic?
     
     
2. Does this play confirm or challenge gender as construction? Gender as essence?
   
   
• From our modern perspective, do we seem to have here the same old same-old?
• What is distinctively classical-Athenian here, perhaps in contrast to modern American attitudes?
• What can the play maybe teach us about gender construction, about the ideology of gender, in classical Athens?
  • What characterizations/generalizations do you hear from men in the play about women?
  • From the women about women?
  • From the women about men?
• Or is it just too ludicrous to be taken seriously?
  
  
3. A look back to the sexuality unit: When the text lampoons Agathon or Cleisthenes for feminine characteristics, is that gay-bashing? Yes, I know it's bashing, but is it gay bashing?
   
   
4. How does this play compare to Lysistrata in its comic premise? In its treatment of women? What do you think now about reading Lysistrata having read Celebrating Women?
   
   
5. What do you think of the comic premise (Aristophanes' in writing this play) that the Thesmophoria, a women's religious festival, was simply a women's mirror polis (city-state)?
   
   
   • Is this simply a topsy-turvey-land, gender-reversing joke like what some students have been seeing in Lysistrata?
   • Does, somehow, fantasizing about the festival supply men with an entrée into a secret world of quasi-political empowerment, one threatening to males like Euripides? Is the play a window into the Athenian male imaginary?

Notes, Comments, Questions Keyed into the Text

pp. 312-131. (book, not pdf, pagination). Note the reference to Euripides' Alcestis. How is that to be taken? How does Alcestis fit into what the play alleges to be Euripides' misogyny?

pp. 340 ff. This play, since its action is concerned with the reception of Euripides' plays, contains a great deal of parody (imitation) of tragic style and of specific tragedies by Euripides. Over-the-top imitation of tragic diction in comedy, whether to evoke specific plays or simply to evoke tragedy as a genre, is called paratragedy.

pp. 340 ff. Aristophanes parodies the Telephus of Eurpides (produced 438 BCE), a play in which Telephus, who's been wounded by Achilles, infiltrates the Greek camp at Argos (they're headed eventually for Troy) to seek healing from Achilles. In the play, Telephus goes disguised as a beggar. When his disguise if discovered, he takes Orestes, Agamemnon's son, hostage to protect himself.

345 ff. Euripides' Palamedes (produced 415). Palamedes, who rivals Odysseus in intelligence, has been framed by his rival, who makes it look like Palamedes has taken gold from the Trojans.

349 ff. Aristophanes parodies the Helen by Euripides (produced 412). In Euripides' Helen, Helen of Troy never actually committed adultery or went to Troy with Paris. Rather, she spent the war - the Trojan War - in Egypt. In Eurpides' play, her husband, Menelaus, arrives in Egypt and the two of them go back from there to Greece.

353 ff. The "Policeman," more precisely, Scythian archer. The Scythians were a barbarian people from the Russian steppe. The Athenians employed Scythian archers as public slaves to serve as a kind of security detail in Athens, not really a police force, but sort of like one. Aristophanes has his Scythian speak very bad Greek. So the accent thing is sort of an authentic touch.

224 ff. Pretending to be Perseus, Euripides flies in to rescue Mnesilochus, here, his "Andromeda." The historical Euripides wrote a play, the Andromeda (412), in which Perseus, equipped with Hermes' flying slippers, swoops in to rescue the title character from a sea monster.

Quiz 2 Study Guide

QUIZ of material covered in class assignments: Pseudo-Demosthenes Against Neaera through Aristophanes Ladies' Day.

It will be very short, plain, non-interpretive, and straightforward — a "fact-check" quiz more than anything else to encourage attentive reading and in-class listening.

Specifically, expect:

• Multiple choice questions targeting. . .
• Class-assigned readings, for which know. . .
  • authors
  • titles (where appropriate)
  • characters, key actors/speakers (where appropriate)
  • basic and crucial content info
• key terms and concepts listed below, for which consult
  • your notes
  • our target texts
  • my PowerPoints
  • Terms page

Terms list:

• andron
• andronitis
• Demeter
• ekdosis
• enguesis
• epikleros
• fetish
• gamos
• gunaikonitis
• hetaira
• kalokagathia
• koinonia
• koinonos
• kurios
• oikia
• oikonomia
• oikos
• pallake
• porne
• Thesmophoria