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motifs in a given structure, then reverse the usual situation by viewing it through the eyes of the oedipal daughter. |
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The Psychology of Initiation Ritual |
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For those still unwilling, however, to grant that the man Aeschylus could compose a drama based on the psychology of women, there remains another possible, if undemonstrable, explanation of Aeschylus' "feminine" sensitivity in elaborating the identifications of the Danaids with Io and of Danaos with Pelasgos and Zeus. Perhaps these aspects of the drama were not invented by Aeschylus but rather derived from lost versions of the story connected with girls' initiation rituals. |
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We know next to nothing about what the Danaid story was like prior to its treatment by Aeschylus. Our earlier sources consist of a few meager fragments from the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and two lines from the epic Danais both probably composed in the 6th century (West 1985: 136, but see Bernal 1987: 97 for an earlier dating of the Danais). Nevertheless a strong argument has recently been made by K. Dowden that the Danaid myth, like the genealogically related myths of Io and the daughters of Proitos, belongs to a large set of narratives which "correspond to the passage rites from maidenhood to the status of married women" (Dowden 1989: 4). In this interpretation the Danaids represent an age-group, the "daughters of the Danaoi tribe" (Dowden 1989: 157), a choros of fifty girls who in ritual performance enact first the rejection of marriage (flight from the suitors and their murder) and then acceptance of marriage (Hypermestra and the footrace arranged for the other Danaids). Dowden's analysis is totally innocent of psychology, and yet a maiden-to-matron initiation exactly fits the psychoanalytic interpretation I have tried to make. Freud, Aeschylus, and initiation-theory all come together in the idea of breaking with the past so that society and individual can successfully advance. For Freud, as we saw earlier, the renunciation of oedipal fantasies in puberty is necessary in order to achieve "detachment from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the new generation and the old" (1905: 226). For Aeschylus, the same idea of escaping from and transforming the past so that a new and better future can be achieved is the central theme of the Oresteia and almost certainly of the Prometheia and Danaid-trilogy as well. And what better myth could there be in which to find this theme encapsulated than one connected with initiation and the transformation of a girl enclosed by her family and the past into a woman entering the future and her role in the social order? |
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It would seem to be precisely this kind of myth which could provide Aeschylus with the pattern elaborated in the Suppliants. We might |
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