ABSTRACT
If ancient thought associated women with ritual and emotion, women on the tragic stage appear often to pervert ritual procedures, displaying paroxysmal emotions which breach gender and social canons. Tragic plots repeatedly explore the dangerous impulsiveness and instability of such female characters, foregrounding their (self)destructiveness. This argument is explored through a discussion of the three Electras, the Danaids in the Aeschylean Suppliants, and the mothers and Evadne in the Euripidean Suppliants. In Aeschylus, women are initially introduced performing properly ritual supplication and lament, whereas in Sophocles and Euripides, the female voice appears from the start to indulge in a markedly de-ritualized mourning. In all plays, however, in one way or another, women reach uninhibited despair and/or rage, and their emotional derailment threatens civic order. In some cases, this threat is fulfilled, in others cancelled – yet, in all cases, female paroxysm appears in urgent need of male control. This shift from ritual to emotion could be seen to run along the process from an ‘immature’ to a ‘mature’ democracy, a regime which may not have invented the concept of female inferiority, yet it configured its political ‘ideologization’. And theatre provided one of its most effective ideological tools.
