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being a man [which] in spite of everything often persists as a formative factor over long periods."7 |
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Nowhere in the text can we see any evidence for masculine behavior on the part of the Danaids, nor is there any evidence of their desire to compete with men on a sexual or non-sexual level. While it must be admitted that phallic imagery recurs in the words of the Danaids (e.g., blood-smeared snakes, sword-like branches, etc.), this hardly indicates the wish to be a man. As the predominant imagery of the play as well as the mass murder which is the climactic action of the trilogy demonstrate, the Danaids are preoccupied not with acquiring the male organ but with the wound they have suffered and its possible recurrence; not with becoming men themselves, but rather with reducing men to their own mutilated state. For this reason phallic imagery appears not in connection with something desirable but as threatening danger, and the major patterns of imagery revolve around such metaphors as the picking of fruit, the shedding of blood, attacking snakes, walls threatened, and flowers which must be guarded. The sexual prospects of the Danaids threaten a re-animation of the original wound; when these future threats become present reality, the Danaids will be compelled to seek vengeance in a like manner, by beheading (i.e., castrating) their violators.8 Only Hypermestra will be able (at least at first) to escape this circle of mutual violence, when she freely chooses a new situation constituted "neither by the blood of defloration transformed into a wound by an arrogant virility, nor the blood from wounds inflicted by women out of hatred for the male sex" (Sissa 1990: 133). |
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7 Freud (1931) 230. For J. van Ophuijsen (1924) 4748, the "idea of being a male" is "an idea based on identification with the father or the brother." For E. Jones (1927) 472, 468, identification with the father represents "denial of femininity,'' is "common to all forms of homosexuality," and "serves the function of keeping feminine wishes in repression." See also Lampl-de Groot (1928) 339. |
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8 Although the Danaids lack masculine characteristics in Aeschylus, this is not true of all non-Aeschylean sources; e.g., the obviously phallic Danaids on a Palermo vase in Cook (1940), 400, fig. XXXVI. |
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Concerning the Danaids' association of sexuality with violent injury and the symbolic castration to which their fears will eventually lead them, note the following remarks by a professedly anti-Freudian female psychiatrist: "Normally, bleeding means damage or injury. It is an extraordinary jump for women to accept the idea that bleeding means health. Therefore fears of having been ripped (raped?) in the vulnerable body interior are not unusual in young girls who have had no preparation for menstruation," "The girl's inhibitions have several origins. More obviously, she is afraid of personal and social rejection; less obviously, not being suffused with a high sexual drive she has difficulty in perceiving vaginal sex as pleasurable and confounds sex with blood, mutilation, pain, penetration, and pregnancy," "I think it probable that penis envy in neurotic girls is less a function of sexual impulses than of aggressive impulses, with a concomitant desire for castration of the boy", Bardwick (1971) 49,52,13. |
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