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alternatives would negate the ambivalence of the force which makes change possible and would reduce the future to a pre-ordained outcome. The emphasis lies squarely on the openness of possibilities, whether to repeat the past or to transform the future. In the ambiguity of great power, great resources, or great emotions, even those possibilities which appear as opposites are contained. The Eumenides are still the Erinyes, and where Eros is weak (or the destructive Eros holds sway), death and strife are strong; but the hope and expectation of Aeschylus may well have been the same as that of Freud, "that the other of the two 'Heavenly Powers,' eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary" (1930: 145). |
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Aeschylus and Female Psychology |
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If we grant that Freud is correct at least in his belief that a prolonged overinvolvement of father and daughter may inhibit the daughter's ability to love other men, the correspondence between this theory and the situation of the Danaids in the Suppliants raises the question of how Aeschylus could write so revealingly and (from a psychoanalytic viewpoint) correctly about female psychology? An obvious answer would be that this ability is part of what makes an artist great, that Aeschylus, like Shakespeare, was not limited to the perspective of his gender. To escape this limitation may be difficult, but it certainly is not impossible, any more than it is impossible for a homosexual dramatist to write about heterosexual psychology or for a white novelist to write about black psychology or for a female poet to write about male psychology. |
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At the same time it must be admitted that anything we now say about women's feelings or thinking or psychology in ancient Greece is largely analogy, since (with the notable exception of Sappho) all of our sources are male: |
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beyond the dominant ideology of the male, which purports to account for society in its totality, there existed . . . another social reality constructed by women in which not only their own role and nature, but also those of men, might have been construed in a significantly different fashion . . . but the evidence for it is not recoverable (Just 1989: 3). |
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Thus another answer might be that Aeschylus is not portraying female psychology at all, but rather male psychology, that what he says about the Danaids and their predicament is from a male viewpoint. Their predicament, after all, is not original with Aeschylus but is found in the body of myth which was the source of almost all Greek tragedy and which almost always represents a male viewpoint. |
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According to this line of reasoning the Danaid myth is an example of one of the most common patterns in Greek myth, the story of a daughter whose |
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