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complex" in women. The Danaids are seen as arrested in an unresolved oedipal fixation upon their father Danaos, a situation which inhibits their femininity, leads to aggressive and masculine behavior, and prevents the extension of their sexual feelings to men other than their father. |
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The view of Kouretas, which emphasizes the "masculinity complex" of the Danaids, recalls Freud's description of three alternate developmental processes which are caused by the female castration complex: |
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The discovery that she is castrated is a turning-point in a girl's growth. Three possible lines of development start from it: one leads to sexual inhibition or neurosis, the second to a change of character in the sense of a masculinity complex, the third, finally, to normal sexuality (1933: 126). |
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For Kouretas, the Danaids would fall into the second category, since they demonstrate |
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la prédominance de tendances actives et agressives qui aboutissent à des conflits avec l'entourage et surtout avec ce que la femme possède en elle de feminin. . . . La peur de la féminité mobilise les tendances masculines, qui à leur tour augmentent le trouble . . . l'envie ou la jalousie de la masculinité qui hante les femmes ainsi névrosées, dont la rivalité avec l'homme et l'agressivité se dissimulent sous une forme plus ou moins tolérable (1957: 597598,602). |
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This position, however, does not correspond with the text of the Suppliants nor is it psychoanalytically self-evident. The Danaids are clearly depicted by Aeschylus as the very antithesis of masculinity. As Murray points out, "The Danaids emphasize throughout the play their femininity and contrast it to the predatory masculinity of the generic male" (1958: 2728). In his study of Aeschylus' characterization of women, Te Riele (1955: 15) finds particularly pronounced in the Danaids a |
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fanatisme déraissonable féminin, trait assez prononcé chez les Danaides. Maisd'autres qualités y sont également: une grande émotivité quand les périls menacent, mais fermeté quand ils sont là; la raffinement dans la persuasion, etc. |
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Kouretas' view that the Danaids' oedipal attachment to their father results in a "masculinity complex" fares little better from a psychoanalytic standpoint. Classical (Freudian) theory regularly ascribes the aetiology of such a neurosis either to identification with the father (as opposed to libidinal attachment) or to regression to a pre-oedipal state of attachment to the mother. According to Freud, the masculinity complex in women is not based on the oedipal situation, but is usually an alternate development, originating (like the oedipus complex) in acknowledgment of the fact of castration, but resulting in the assertion of masculinity and "the fantasy of |
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