Euripides’ Alcestis and Medea are plays about a woman of exemplary virtue and a woman of horrible vice, respectively. This thesis examines how both heroines have a subjectivity that is destructive because they are female, and which is expressed by making deals with men. Women’s deal-making is dangerous because it conflicts with a system of exchange exclusive to men, in which women function as objects of exchange which solidify men’s homosocial bonds. Alcestis’ and Medea’s deals with men disrupt these bonds. Alcestis’ dangerous subjectivity is contained when she is made the passive object of exchange between men, while in Medea’s case, the absence of deals between men allows the uncontained effect of her deal-making to destroy her family and community. Comparison of the plays shows that the suppression of women’s deal-making, and not the benign or malicious intent of the deal-maker, is crucial to the happy resolution of the play.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/2996 |
| Date | 30 August 2010 |
| Creators | Mayes, Lauren |
| Contributors | Bowman, Laurel |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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