D.Litt. et Phil. / In the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the female characters meet with one of five different fates: vilification, silencing or erasure from the text, metamorphosis, sacrifice or murder. In Ancient Greek culture, ideas of the female corresponded to the following archetypes: Virgin and Wife/Mother. There exists, in mythology, another repository of archetypes which we may categorise as a group of women not connected to the household, functioning on the level of legend or the supernatural, who represent negative degrees of aberration of the feminine. The first two categories, Virgin and Wife/Mother, therefore, are integral to the Greek concept of the oikos (household) whilst the third category, Female Aberrations or Monsters, are seen as a direct threat to the oikos. I postulate a connection between the female characters of Aeschylus’ drama, the mythical archetypes of women found in myth and the fates suffered by each character. My focus in this dissertation, Archetypal Simulacra—Women in Aeschylus’ Oresteia is the depiction of female characters in the Oresteia and how the mythological archetypes of women as described above have influenced this depiction. I aim to determine how Aeschylus used traditional myths and depictions and what the extent and purpose was of his mythopoesis. I first offer a preliminary exploration of women as defined by social practice and various canonical literary works which served to define many mythological precedents for how women were conceived in later literature. This task I divide into two aspects: firstly in an assessment of the archetypes appearing in Greek mythology to which the female characters in the Oresteia correspond; and secondly in an exploration of how these characters were ‘scripted’ into the trilogy and to what extent they supported or undermined their societal ‘script’. In my aim to discover the connection between the portrayal of the female characters, their mythical determinants and the fates they suffer in the course of the drama I conclude that Aeschylus adapts myth in such a way that it underpins and justifies the patriarchal structures. He changes or eradicates his female characters who threaten to reject these strictures. He supplies us with female figures who support the male cause while he violently negates those women who threaten to damage male authority. The playwright has used the plasticity of traditional myth to support the society of Athens with its attitudes and fears regarding the feminine Other who exists in its shadows.

This study explores evocations of the concept of the "Amazon Woman" and her female tribe, from cross-continental prehistoric sources to contemporary ritual practice within native amerindian belief systems of the rain forests of South America. The designation "Amazon" for the world's largest river has often been considered a grand "mistake" made by sixteenth century explorers; imaginative portrayals of Amazons had invigorated the reports of numerous early travelers, including Marco Polo, Columbus, and Hernan Cortes. This analysis establishes the importance of a reconsideration of the Amazon "mistake," or the idea that Europeans were projecting the fantastical worlds and dramatic personae of classical Greek legends and later romances of chivalry onto the realms of New World daily experience. The deep roots of prehistoric and historic civilizations carry the fragmentary genesis of matristic views of the world--the Mother, deified as Warrior, is a constant sign and symbol interplaying within the semiotics of the Amazon. The amazons of the New World were both ancient sister kin and actual tribal homosocial units who played vital roles in sacred religious beliefs and clan organization. I read the corpus of chronicles on, and studies of, the question of Amazons through a multi-faceted and multidisciplinary lense: archeology, history, anthropology, ethnography, mythology, literary criticism, and the sciences all intertwine to provide a more wholistic view of the subject. The text of the Amazons is clarified here by the consideration of prehistoric fragment upon fragment, reuniting five tribal narratives from the rain forests of South America, which reconstitutes the overall corpus of the Amazon mythos in Latin America. An autobiographical opening juxtaposes the continuum between the personal and cultural microstructures of my own approach to this subject with the macrostructures of the socio-symbolic order generally, and keeps a double focus constantly at play throughout the entire analytical text. Finally, Amazons are defined as evocations of natural phenomena and the diversity of animal and human behaviors as represented in mythical, cultural, and social spheres. This thesis comprises a literary analytical process I define as "ecotextuality": the reading of biotic diversity through its multiple languages, not excluding the "I" of the reader/writer.