Exchange and the Maiden

by Ormand, Kirk

• ISBN13: 9780292760523
• ISBN10: 0292760523
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781477301586
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr
• More Book Details
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Summary

Marriage is a central concern in five of the seven extant plays of the Greek tragedian Sophocles. In this pathfinding study, Kirk Ormand delves into the ways in which these plays represent and problematize marriage, thus offering insights into how Athenians thought about the institution of marriage. Ormand takes a two-fold approach. He first explores the legal and economic underpinnings of Athenian marriage, an institution designed to guarantee the legitimate continuation of patrilineal households. He then shows how Sophocles' plays Trachiniae, Electra, Antigone, Ajax, and Oedipus Tyrannus both reinforce and critique this ideology by representing marriage as a homosocial exchange between men, in which women are objects who may attempt--but always fail--to become self-acting subjects. These fresh readings provide the first systematic study of marriage in Sophocles. They draw important connections between drama and marriage as rituals concerned with controlling potentially disruptive female subjectivities.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Journals and Their Abbreviations	xi
Introduction Marriage and Tragedy	1	(8)
The Semantics of Greek Marriage	9	(27)
Male Homosocial Desire in the Trachiniae	36	(24)
Electra, Never a Bride	60	(19)
Family Matters in the Antigone	79	(25)
The Ajax, or Marriage by Default	104	(20)
Nature and its Discontents in the Oedipus tyrannus	124	(29)
Epilogue Exit to Silence	153	(10)
Notes	163	(32)
Bibliography	195	(12)
General Index	207	(10)
Index of Passages Cited	217