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Literally, of course, the child of the cow is Epaphos; however, the chorus appears to be intensifying its sense of identification with the ancestral line, since any dishonor to Epaphos is in this case figurative, and the phrase is only a circumlocution for dishonor to the Danaids themselves. Increasingly they think of themselves as "children of the cow" (1958: 24). |
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The Danaids' also refer to themselves as  ("seed of a fruitful cow", 275; cf. 141, 151), and on one occasion describe themselves as a heifer (350353). Both identifications made by the Danaids, that with Io and that with Epaphos, are explicable in light of the importance attached by psychoanalytic theory to the girl's identification with her mother (Lampl-de Groot 1928: 330) and to her desire to have a child that is a double of herself (Brown 1959: 127). |
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In the fantasy of the Danaids, the relationship between Zeus, the father they love, and Io, the mother with whom they identify, is clear enough Zeus is the lover and savior of Io but two factors in the relationship are particularly significant: the miraculous conception of Epaphos and the tortured wanderings of Io. |
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The rescue of Io and the conception of Epaphos are accomplished not by an explicit sexual act but by the breath and touch of Zeus (lines 17, 44, 535, 576577, 10661067). The divine child, with whom the Danaids also identify themselves, is conceived immaculately. The frequent occurrence of immaculate conception in myth and religion (cf. Jesus in Christian myth or Quetzalcoatl in Aztec myth) stems ultimately from the child's refusal to believe that the mother is not a virgin (Jones 1923: 357). This refusal may be due to the over-valuation of the pre-oedipal mother, to the infantile sadistic perception of intercourse (Bonaparte 1966: 132134), or to the oedipal situation in which the child wishes to preserve the parent of the opposite sex for itself. In the event that the female child in the oedipal situation intensely identifies with the mother, intolerable tension may develop. On the one hand, she wishes to have the father to herself and to deny the mother sexual access to the father; on the other hand, vicarious satisfaction of her own desires may be attained through identification with the mother as sexual object of the father. This tension is portrayed in the Suppliants through the ambiguity surrounding the virginity of Io and through the non-sexual conception of Epaphos, the divine child who must be born as the child the Danaids are to receive from the father. Because the tension must accept both possibilities, the tortured wanderings of Io are both the punishment for her sexual relationship with the father (Wayne 1951: 216) and also the projection by the Danaids of their own incestuous guilt feelings (Freud 1917). Significantly, it is not Zeus, as in the Prometheus but Hera who is the chief agent of Io's suffering. Murray remarks cryptically that "Hera is, moreover, only an aspect of the deity" (1958: 57, n.3) but Hera is |
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