You can find Part One of this essay here, Part Two, here, and Part Three, here.
What motivates an Athenian woman like Lysistrata to take action based on her own ideas about War and Peace, even if motivated by a sense of Duty that exceeded the cultural expectations of her time? In the Syntopicon, Adler defines a Hero as one who does “not despair in the face of almost helpless odds” as well as possessing “the strength and stamina to achieve whatever they set their minds and wills to do” before finally adding that “they would not be heroes if they were not men of courage.” [195]. In other words, Lysistrata is a Man of Courage…except, of course, that she is not a man at all. Possessed of marvelous modern minds, we can easily remedy this malapropism by calling her a Woman of Courage or, perhaps a Person of Courage.
While this glissando may pave over some of Adler’s unattractive chauvinism, it does not clarify his meaning or even defuse those critics who might argue that Lysistrata is a incredible (as in not credible) character because no woman could have done what she is portrayed as doing in the time and place where she does it. In order to untangle this cluster of irreconcilables, we must do as Lysistrata herself suggests and “put it to the spindle, unwind it this way, now that way” as “that’s how we’ll unravel this war, if you’ll let us.” [853]
It would be disingenuous to characterize the unmistakable patina of phallocentrism in Adler’s opening description of Courage as a mere byproduct of his worldview and not endemic to the material he is drawing from in his delineation of the Great Ideas one from another. There is a particular telling passage a few paragraphs later where he asserts that “such courage is a virtue in the primary sense of the Latin word virtus—manliness, the spirit, or strength of spirit, required to be a man” [196].
To see the illogic inherent in a sentence like that, one must think it in three modes, Greek, Roman, and Modern. His first assertion, that Courage is a virtue sets specific parameters wherein Virtue is the Set and Courage is a sub-set. This is reasonable enough as we can easily think, as could the ancient Greeks, of other kinds of virtue as well; some masculine in nature, some feminine in nature, and some inhabiting no gender at all. The Greek word arete (translated into English as virtue) had more to do with the ultimate fulfillment of something’s function than some warm and fuzzy feelings about how people ought to treat one another.
Moving to his second premise we are told that Courage is, in itself congruous with the primary meaning of the Latin word virtus which, as we can see from his description, is neither feminine nor neuter but specifically masculine. This admission places every other kind of virtue (of which there are many) as subservient to the ultimate fulfillment of what it means to be a man. In Greek, this masculine Courage (or Courage of the body as he later defines it) is one type of virtue among many. In Latin, all virtue is made subordinate to that of being masculine. In English, the distinction is invisible but no less potent in its connotation.
Adler, to his credit, does not end his exploration of Courage with this exclusively masculine expression though he does lumps the remainder as “other sorts of Courage” [196].
The courage of the tragic hero, of Oedipus and Antigone, goes with strength of mind, not body. This, perhaps even more than being lionhearted, is a specifically human strength. Courage does not consist only in conquering fear and in withholding the body from flight no matter what the risk of pain. It consists at least as much in steeling the will, reinforcing its resolutions, and turning the mind relentlessly to seek or face the truth. [196]
Pausing for one last moment to remark upon the cluelessness of not recognizing that childbirth is pretty damn obvious example of “conquering fear” while “withholding the body from flight no matter what the risk of pain”, Adler does extend the personhood of mind to women, going so far as to describe his Courage of the mind it as a human strength rather than a manly one. He also provides more criteria by which to judge the courageousness of Lysistrata’s actions in her capacity to summon her will, enact a plan of action based on her convictions and confronting her culture’s long-held notions on gender in the service of Truth.
Turning to the text at hand, there is ample evidence of not only Lysistrata exhibiting both kinds of Courage but other women as well. There are a number of obstacles that threaten to derail the wives’ strike before it is even fully hatched. The most persistent one is the women’s own hunger for sex, already badly malnourished as they are by the never-ending war. While this is the hurdle to which Aristophanes returns to the most often (because it’s funny and this is a comedy), it is not the most dire in terms of consequences.
LYSISTRATA: Just imagine: we’re at home, beautifully made up, wearing our sheerest lawn negligees and nothing underneath…and the men are all like ramrods and can’t wait to leap into bed, and then we’ll absolutely refuse—that’ll make them make peace soon enough, you’ll see.
LAMPITO: Din ye mind how Menelaus threw away his sword when he saw but a glimpse of Helen’s breasties?
CALONICE: But, look, what if they divorce us?
LYSISTRATA: Well, that wouldn’t help them much, would it? Like Pherecrates says, it would be no more use than skinning the same dog twice.
CALONICE:…What if they take hold of us and drag us into the bedroom by force?
LYSISTRATA: Cling to the door.
CALONICE: And if they hit us and force us to let go?
LYSISTRATA: Why, in that case, you’ve got to be as damned unresponsive as possible. There’s no pleasure in it if they have to use force and give pain. They’ll give up trying soon enough. And no man is ever happy if he can’t please his woman. [827]
There is no disputing that Aristophanes’ dialogue here is very funny. There is also no disputing that anyone of those things could happen to a Greek woman if she refused to fulfill her wifely duties, whether domestic or carnal. The threat of social retribution is real. The threat of physical violence is real. Fitting in with the tone of the play, however, the men’s response to their wives’ abandonment of them is mostly one of confusion and helplessness.
Lysistrata’s usurpation of male authority does not end, however, with the mere refusal of women to act like wives. The more subversive facet of her strategy, to occupy the Acropolis, thus depriving the men of the money they need to continue waging war is not met with the same hapless amusement. A chorus of men arrive almost immediately with fire to burn them out of the Temple. Though the battle that erupts between dueling choruses of old men and old women is more comedic than threatening, the violent timbre of the men’s exasperation is unmistakable and met by an equal fury from their female counterparts.
LEADER [to his neighbor]: Are we going to let them go on blethering like this? Shouldn’t we be bringing our logs down on their back?
STRATYLLIS: [to her followers]: Put down your jars too. We don’t want any encumbrances in case it comes to a fight.
LEADER [raising his fist]: Someone ought to give them a Bupalus or two on the jaw—that might shut them up for a bit.
STRATYLLIS [presenting her cheek to him]: All right, there you are; hit me; I won’t shy away. Only if you do, no dog will ever grab your balls again!
LEADER: If you don’t shut up, you old crone, I’ll knock the stuffing out of you!
STRATYLLIS: If you so much as touch me with the tip of your finger—
LEADER: All right, suppose I do; what then?
STRATYLLIS: I’ll bite your chest and tear out your inside! [830]
The women of Lysistrata are clearly shown exhibiting both physical and mental courage despite Adler’s assertion that the former is the exclusive domain of the masculine. One might say (and some have said) that the women of this play behave not as women do but as men and, therein lies its comedy. While that interpretation is open to those seeking it, Aristophanes’ comedic technique of inversion (something Lysistrata shares with The Clouds) is effective because of the unexpected truths that it uncovers. Though the women of Greece may not have been any more able to act in accord to end war (or even desire such as thing) as the women of the world today, Aristophanes’ meditations on the relationship of women to war and, on a broader level, to the societies to which they belong are universally potent in their insights.
Showing posts with label Courage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Courage. Show all posts
Monday, April 20, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Great Books: Aristophanes' Lysistrata (Part 1 of 4)
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Time: First performed in 411 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas Considered: Duty, Courage, War and Peace
[The complete text of Lysistrata can be found online at http://drama.eserver.org/plays/classical/aristophanes/lysistrata.txt. This text differs some from the Sommerstein translation I'll be quoting from, most notably in Sommerstein's playful use of a Scottish dialect to differentiate the Spartans from the Athenians.]
Among Aristophanes’ eleven extant plays, Lysistrata is the one with which modern readers most often identify though for reasons that have more to do with modernity than the play itself. This wishful story of an Athenian woman who brokers a lasting peace to the Peloponnesian War generates its humor in the typical Aristophanic fashion through the inversion of particular status quo value. In this case, Aristophanes takes the typically passive role that women played in classic Greek culture and reverses it as the women refuse to perform their wifely duties until the war’s conclusion. Lysistrata’s ribald dialogue and openness in discussing sexual relationships between men and women has made it a perpetual source of controversy and, no doubt, contributed to its persistence within the Western cultural tradition. Aristophanes’ device of placing a woman at the story’s center as its heroine has also gained attention from post-feminist thinkers as prescient in its depiction of women as co-equal to men, in deed if not social status.
In contrast to its reputation, Lysistrata is not unique among Aristophanes’ work (even among those extant) in its candid discussions of sex. If anything, Lysistrata is positively moral by Victorian standards in comparison to The Clouds which is replete with homoerotic humor and nary a female character to be found. Most of the sex discussed in Lysistrata is of the marital variety and predominantly heterosexual in nature. While it does presuppose, if only satirically, that women have sexual needs that go beyond their desire to procreate (a subject of much debate in the US up through the 1950s), no actual sex occurs within its narrative frame; literally, much ado about nothing.
As a reader well-grounded in the canon of feminist writing, I also have extreme difficulty thinking of Lysistrata as a feminist work of any sort. At best, it might be described as ‘womanist,’ tacitly acknowledging the personhood of women without seeing this distinction as grounds for a true reconsideration of the gender roles as prescribed by the traditions of culture. For all the attention paid to sex by the play and posterity that has received it, sex is but a magnified symbol of the many contributions that women make to society through their management of the household while men are away, busy slaughtering one another. In their refusal to perform the totality of those duties (including but hardly limited to sex), Lysistrata and her band of conspirators cripple the productivity of Greece in the same way that a slave rebellion or a grain embargo might. In this sense, Lysistrata can be read as a vigorous defense of the traditional Greek values of womanhood even as it upsets the social order for comedic purposes with its value inversion.
So, if Lysistrata is neither the Greek equivalent of the Tropic of Cancer nor The Feminine Mystique, then what the heck is it? To begin that discussion, it is important to set Lysistrata as most immediately relevant to a particular place and time; namely, Athens in 411 BCE, when and where the play was first performed. Socially, Athens was in utter turmoil. After fifty years of unquestioned superiority among the Greek city-states and the dominions beyond, Athens’ status began to slowly erode with the onset of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. Their military and naval might forced the first leg of the War to a conclusion in 421 but, within six years, conflict broke out again and, in 415, the Athenian navy was destroyed by Syracuse allied with Sparta. Humiliated by that defeat and the loss of some of their colonies, Athens elected to double down and use the lumber and wealth that had placed in reserve at the war’s onset to raise a second fleet. In 411, the same year that Lysistrata was first performed, the Athenian democracy was overthrown by an oligarchy known as the Council of Four Hundred. The tension between the democratic and oligarchic factions could be essentially boiled down to how the remaining funds and resources would be spent in preparation for the recommencement of full-scale war. While the Council of Four Hundred would only persist for four months before Athens’ democratic system was restored, one can only imagine the degree of anxiety about the future that the average Athenian (such as one who might have attended this play) was feeling. In a way, the mere inversion of women’s relationship to war that sits at the play’s heart would be a comfort in comparison to the whiplash reversals of fortune that had plagued the city for over two decades.
Sitting down with the Syntopicon to decide which of the Great Ideas might prove illuminating for a discussion of Lysistrata, I found myself embroiled in a quandary. Much to my surprise (and I must admit, chagrin), Gender is not one of the Great Ideas. Woman and/or Womanhood are not Great Ideas. Man, on the other hand, is a Great Idea and, as one might suspect, this is the Old School definition of Man that presumes both men and women under its authority. However one might see fit to measure it, I’m just feminist enough in my acculturation that I loathe hearing the words ‘Man’ or ’Mankind’ as a synonym for humanity. Whenever reading a passage aloud that insists upon doing it, I usually insert the parenthetical (“because they didn’t have women back then”) just to keep from feeling like an ass.
One of the most persistent and, frankly, well-earned criticisms of The Great Books series and the editorial materials that accompany it is that it is, at best, chauvinist and, at worse, openly misogynist in its organization of ideas and in its selection of works for consideration. We nearly lost Kendra a couple of weeks ago to the dunes of seething anger when we realized that the only woman represented by ALL TEN YEARS of the Great Books reading list was Jane Austen. The argument I made then and then one I present now is that the lion’s share of the scholarship that went into compiling the Great Books series was done in the early 1950s. The editorial board, at the time, didn’t feel that enough time had elapsed in the 20th century for them to develop the amount of cultural objectivity requisite to deciding what might be of lasting historical merit and what might not. When Adler and his staff returned to the task in the late 1980s, they did feel confident enough to include works published from 1900 to 1950. Consequently, the selections from the second edition highlight a virtual explosion of women contributing to the Great Conversation in the first half of the 20th century. For all the Aphra Behn’s and Sappho’s that might have been considered in the first edition but weren’t, the second edition does improve upon its relationship with women, if not repair it altogether with a more exhaustive examination of what the breadth and depth of that contribution to the written tradition might actually be.
Deprived by the Great Ideas of a direct way to address the womanist aspects of Lysistrata, my thinking turned immediately subversive. I considered selecting Slavery and drawing parallels from the play between that institution and the one of marriage. I also considered selecting Man and using it as an opportunity to criticize the inadequacies of the Great Ideas as they stand. In the end, however, my desire to utilize the Great Ideas in the constructive spirit in which they were collected prevailed. I visualized them as an elaborate Tarot Deck, broadly sketching various aspects of the human experience with the assumption that the aspirant will bring their own knowledge to the table to truly flesh out the medians between the various ideas. Narrowed down to three from a possible field of six, I chose to filter my discussion of Lysistrata through the Great Ideas of Duty, Courage, and War and Peace.
Time: First performed in 411 BCE
Place: Athens, Greece
Great Ideas Considered: Duty, Courage, War and Peace
[The complete text of Lysistrata can be found online at http://drama.eserver.org/plays/classical/aristophanes/lysistrata.txt. This text differs some from the Sommerstein translation I'll be quoting from, most notably in Sommerstein's playful use of a Scottish dialect to differentiate the Spartans from the Athenians.]
Among Aristophanes’ eleven extant plays, Lysistrata is the one with which modern readers most often identify though for reasons that have more to do with modernity than the play itself. This wishful story of an Athenian woman who brokers a lasting peace to the Peloponnesian War generates its humor in the typical Aristophanic fashion through the inversion of particular status quo value. In this case, Aristophanes takes the typically passive role that women played in classic Greek culture and reverses it as the women refuse to perform their wifely duties until the war’s conclusion. Lysistrata’s ribald dialogue and openness in discussing sexual relationships between men and women has made it a perpetual source of controversy and, no doubt, contributed to its persistence within the Western cultural tradition. Aristophanes’ device of placing a woman at the story’s center as its heroine has also gained attention from post-feminist thinkers as prescient in its depiction of women as co-equal to men, in deed if not social status.
In contrast to its reputation, Lysistrata is not unique among Aristophanes’ work (even among those extant) in its candid discussions of sex. If anything, Lysistrata is positively moral by Victorian standards in comparison to The Clouds which is replete with homoerotic humor and nary a female character to be found. Most of the sex discussed in Lysistrata is of the marital variety and predominantly heterosexual in nature. While it does presuppose, if only satirically, that women have sexual needs that go beyond their desire to procreate (a subject of much debate in the US up through the 1950s), no actual sex occurs within its narrative frame; literally, much ado about nothing.
As a reader well-grounded in the canon of feminist writing, I also have extreme difficulty thinking of Lysistrata as a feminist work of any sort. At best, it might be described as ‘womanist,’ tacitly acknowledging the personhood of women without seeing this distinction as grounds for a true reconsideration of the gender roles as prescribed by the traditions of culture. For all the attention paid to sex by the play and posterity that has received it, sex is but a magnified symbol of the many contributions that women make to society through their management of the household while men are away, busy slaughtering one another. In their refusal to perform the totality of those duties (including but hardly limited to sex), Lysistrata and her band of conspirators cripple the productivity of Greece in the same way that a slave rebellion or a grain embargo might. In this sense, Lysistrata can be read as a vigorous defense of the traditional Greek values of womanhood even as it upsets the social order for comedic purposes with its value inversion.
So, if Lysistrata is neither the Greek equivalent of the Tropic of Cancer nor The Feminine Mystique, then what the heck is it? To begin that discussion, it is important to set Lysistrata as most immediately relevant to a particular place and time; namely, Athens in 411 BCE, when and where the play was first performed. Socially, Athens was in utter turmoil. After fifty years of unquestioned superiority among the Greek city-states and the dominions beyond, Athens’ status began to slowly erode with the onset of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. Their military and naval might forced the first leg of the War to a conclusion in 421 but, within six years, conflict broke out again and, in 415, the Athenian navy was destroyed by Syracuse allied with Sparta. Humiliated by that defeat and the loss of some of their colonies, Athens elected to double down and use the lumber and wealth that had placed in reserve at the war’s onset to raise a second fleet. In 411, the same year that Lysistrata was first performed, the Athenian democracy was overthrown by an oligarchy known as the Council of Four Hundred. The tension between the democratic and oligarchic factions could be essentially boiled down to how the remaining funds and resources would be spent in preparation for the recommencement of full-scale war. While the Council of Four Hundred would only persist for four months before Athens’ democratic system was restored, one can only imagine the degree of anxiety about the future that the average Athenian (such as one who might have attended this play) was feeling. In a way, the mere inversion of women’s relationship to war that sits at the play’s heart would be a comfort in comparison to the whiplash reversals of fortune that had plagued the city for over two decades.
Sitting down with the Syntopicon to decide which of the Great Ideas might prove illuminating for a discussion of Lysistrata, I found myself embroiled in a quandary. Much to my surprise (and I must admit, chagrin), Gender is not one of the Great Ideas. Woman and/or Womanhood are not Great Ideas. Man, on the other hand, is a Great Idea and, as one might suspect, this is the Old School definition of Man that presumes both men and women under its authority. However one might see fit to measure it, I’m just feminist enough in my acculturation that I loathe hearing the words ‘Man’ or ’Mankind’ as a synonym for humanity. Whenever reading a passage aloud that insists upon doing it, I usually insert the parenthetical (“because they didn’t have women back then”) just to keep from feeling like an ass.
One of the most persistent and, frankly, well-earned criticisms of The Great Books series and the editorial materials that accompany it is that it is, at best, chauvinist and, at worse, openly misogynist in its organization of ideas and in its selection of works for consideration. We nearly lost Kendra a couple of weeks ago to the dunes of seething anger when we realized that the only woman represented by ALL TEN YEARS of the Great Books reading list was Jane Austen. The argument I made then and then one I present now is that the lion’s share of the scholarship that went into compiling the Great Books series was done in the early 1950s. The editorial board, at the time, didn’t feel that enough time had elapsed in the 20th century for them to develop the amount of cultural objectivity requisite to deciding what might be of lasting historical merit and what might not. When Adler and his staff returned to the task in the late 1980s, they did feel confident enough to include works published from 1900 to 1950. Consequently, the selections from the second edition highlight a virtual explosion of women contributing to the Great Conversation in the first half of the 20th century. For all the Aphra Behn’s and Sappho’s that might have been considered in the first edition but weren’t, the second edition does improve upon its relationship with women, if not repair it altogether with a more exhaustive examination of what the breadth and depth of that contribution to the written tradition might actually be.
Deprived by the Great Ideas of a direct way to address the womanist aspects of Lysistrata, my thinking turned immediately subversive. I considered selecting Slavery and drawing parallels from the play between that institution and the one of marriage. I also considered selecting Man and using it as an opportunity to criticize the inadequacies of the Great Ideas as they stand. In the end, however, my desire to utilize the Great Ideas in the constructive spirit in which they were collected prevailed. I visualized them as an elaborate Tarot Deck, broadly sketching various aspects of the human experience with the assumption that the aspirant will bring their own knowledge to the table to truly flesh out the medians between the various ideas. Narrowed down to three from a possible field of six, I chose to filter my discussion of Lysistrata through the Great Ideas of Duty, Courage, and War and Peace.
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