My favourite local library has little brackets at the ends of each of their shelves, displaying particularly tempting books at eye level, just daring you to walk on by.
I recently succumbed to Simon Goldhill's Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives, and as I stood in the aisle and casually flipped through, pretending I wasn't neglecting the work I had really come to do, this passage jumped out at me:
The Greek word most often translated as 'love' is eros. But 'desire' is much more accurate in most cases.... Eros is not like 'love' in a Romantic or Christian sense. In a sexual context, it is most often described as a sickness, a burning and destructive fire, which is not wanted by the sufferer at all. As a social force, it can be highly destructive. According to modern song lyrics, 'love makes the world go round', or 'love is a many-splendored thing'. For Aeschylus, the tragic poet, 'Eros destroys and perverts all the yoked bonds of society,' and for Sophocles, 'Eros drags the minds of just men into injustice and destruction.'...'Self-control' is the most prized of virtues [to the classical Athenian], and it means not desiring to desire. It also means controlling the unfortunate self as much as possible when and if the regrettable happens and unconquerable desire does strike.... Penelope and Odysseus in the Odyssey... for all their twenty years of suffering, and for all that they do go to bed together at the climax of the story of return, never once express sexual desire or sexual longing for each other.... In Homer, sexual desire is always dangerous for a man, and, in women, always a sign of the corruption of proper order...
The same pattern is true in the tragic dramas of the classical city of Athens. It's an axiom of modern therapy that learning to express desire is a positive and empowering freedom. But in Greek tragedy, every woman who expresses sexual desire, even for her husband, causes the violent destruction of the household. Any woman who articulates her sexual desire becomes a monster -- from Medea, who ends up killing her own children, to Clytemnestra, who kills her husband....
At the heart of the matter stands a particular understanding of desire. The adult male experiences desire -- but he neither aims to be, nor does he want to be, the object of desire. He may certainly wish to be treated with respect, honour, duty and so forth, but he does not want to be subjected to another's control. He does not want to be the object of pursuit. If his wife, his body, his desires or his household get the better of him, he runs the risk of becoming a figure of ridicule, of humiliation, or even being destroyed. A man should not submit himself to another's feelings....
This lack of reciprocity, linked to the hierarchical power relations between the genders, leads to a vista of marriage which seems particularly bleak to a modern lover. We don't have a single female voice from the classical city of Athens. Not one word of writing from a woman survives (apart from the occasional dedicatory inscription that 'so-and-so gave this'). The few narratives of female desire we have, all told to us by men, end in disaster or violent humour.... It is male concerns we see: how to be self-controlled, dominant, the subject who acts and desires, not the object who flees from an advance.
Of course, Phèdre is a 17th-century French, not archaic or classical Greek, spin on the story. But while Racine softens the Artemis-cult chastity and acid misogyny of Euripides' Hippolytus, gender relations had not changed so drastically in 2100-odd years. As disturbing to the prince, perhaps, as the idea of adultery or incest is the experience of finding himself transformed from "the subject who acts and desires" into "the object who flees from an advance."
And while Phèdre herself has a far more central and active role in the play that bears her name (I do wonder what made Racine change his title from Phèdre et Hippolyte), she remains at the end of the day a victim of eros, suffering "a sickness, a burning and destructive fire, which is not wanted by the sufferer at all."
Posted by Alison Humphrey at December 18, 2009 06:19 PM