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of the grip in which a person is held by the past, whether the individual past that begins with birth or the supra-individual past that includes everything which can still affect the present. As Freud wrote, "the human individual has to devote himself to the great task of detaching himself from his parents, and not until that task is achieved can he cease to be a child and become a member of the social community" (19161917: 337). |
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In the final play of the trilogy, the Danaids' unitary fantasy of themselves as living out the determined repetition of the passion of Io a fantasy which "is not just a memory, but the hallucinatory re-animation of memory, a mode of self-delusion substituting the past for the present" (Brown 1959: 164) is shattered by Hypermestra, who frees herself from the collective neurosis, liberates repressed Eros, and emerges as an individual (Winnington-Ingram 1961: 146147, 151). The reason for Hypermestra's action is given in the Prometheus: |
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But desire will charm one of the girls from killing her bed-partner. (865866) |
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Much energy has been expended in the debate over whether  refers to  25 There is no reason, however, to excise the ambiguity which Aeschylus put into the phrase, Hypermestra desires both children and her new husband. Her refusal to obey her father symbolizes her inner freedom from the father who restricts love as well as from the desire to have a child from the father. While her sisters continue bound to the compulsive repetition of the past and their pathological subjection to their father, Hypermestra is freed from the burden of her own past and that of her race. The child she desires and the love she feels are no longer products of fantasy, but for the first time are firmly situated in reality. As the one sizable extant fragment of the Danaids indicates, the Eros which wins over Hypermestra is no private illusion; it is the universal reality which "compels the earth to undergo marriage" and which ensures the generation and sustenance of all life (Fr. 125 M). It is through the liberation of this Eros in her own life that Hypermestra is enabled to escape the illusions of the group, its tendency "constantly to give what is unreal precedence over what is real" (Freud 1921: 80). At the same time, emergence from the bondage of infantile sexuality brings with it the realization of her own individuality, as her love for Lynkeus makes it possible for her to break away from the group. In Freud's words, "two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction are making a demonstration against the herd instinct, the group feeling" (1921: 140). |
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25 For the various arguments, see Garvie (1969) 225226. It sometimes seems in this dispute that the virtue of Hypermestra depends on  modifying  . |
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