| Summary: | This thesis seeks to explore the gendered politics in Sophocles’ Trachiniae. In particular, in the first chapter, I suggest that Deianeira’s Amazonian prehistory introduces from the outset a paradoxical and unstable symbol of similarity and difference that creates tension between masculinity and femininity. Following that, in the second chapter, I discuss the remote and monstrous un-political setting that is defined by disclaimers of marriage and illicit sexualities, namely Herakles and his monstrous competitors (Acheloos, Nessos), in order to argue that this world is juxtaposed to the social sustainability that is ensured through the well-being of the oikos. With an Amazon being placed within the civilized arrangement of an oikos, Trachiniae negotiates the locus of the female and advocates the need to expel the monstrous sexualities from the polis. Within the blurred boundaries of gender distinctions, however, it is striking that the sustainability of the oikos and the polis is projected onto the female pole while the male is deployed to project their destruction.
Next, in the third chapter, through a discussion of the marital narratives of the drama, I follow the way this irregular mythical material is civilized to be included within a structure that repeatedly refers to marriage. It will appear that the structure of the play is formed on the basis of repeated distortions of the wedding ritual, and consequently of nuptial gender categories, so that the entire synthesis can be read as the dramatization of three potential marriages, two ‘death as marriage’ ceremonies and a funeral. In the fourth chapter, I focus on Deianeira’s interaction with the monstrous Centaur and the problematic of this exchange, which I read as the reasonable and unpreventable consequence of an already corroded network of reciprocities. As a follow up to this exchange, I look closer at the play’s proposal as far as the consequences of this deed are concerned and in relation to different systems of justice. Finally, in my last chapter, I examine the end of the play within the frame of the patriarchal structures of Greek tragedy, and in particular in view of dramatic and patriarchal authority. With Deianeira being absent, this concluding part seems to function as a defense against the collapse of gender boundaries and as an attempt to reinstate the impaired gender order. Still, Hyllos’ stance and Deianeira’s dynamic absence provoke a protest against this attempt, a protest which succeeds in enhancing the dynamics of negotiation in which the play has invested.
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