All quotations are from Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). References to the character of Phaedra are to Euripides' play, not that of Racine - you may find it useful to reflect on parallels and contrasts between the two.


[Normal social expectations of women in ancient Athens:] It was in the depths of her house that a Greek woman was supposed to live out her existence as young girl, as wife, and as mother; and it was shut up in her house, far from the gaze of others, that she had to end her life. (p. ix)

A woman was allowed no accomplishment beyond leading an exemplary existence, quietly as wife and mother alongside a man who lived the life of a citizen. [...] If she survived her husband, it was for a woman not to get herself talked about among men, in terms of either praise or blame. The glory of a woman was to have no glory. (p. 2)


[Contrast between female deaths in tragedy and those in Athenian society:] Women in tragedy died violently. More precisely, it was in this violence that a woman mastered her death, a death that was not simply the end of an exemplary life as a spouse. It was a death that belonged to her totally, whether, like Sophocles' Jocasta, she inflicted it "herself upon herself" or, more paradoxically, had it inflicted upon her. (pp. 3-4)


[On the types of death that women encounter in Greek tragedy:] [...] some of them were murdered, such as Clytemnestra and Megara, but many more had recourse to suicide, as the only escape in a desperate misfortune - Jocasta and, again in Sophocles, Deianira, Antigone, and Eurydice; Phaedra and, again in Euripides, Evadne and, in the background of the Helen, Leda. Finally, in the case of young girls, the sacrificial knife was the favored instrument of death, and to the host of wives who killed themselves, one must add the group of virgins who were sacrificial victims, from Iphigenia to Polyxena and including Macaria and the daughters of Erechtheus. (p. 4)

There was one form of suicide - an already despised form of death - that was more disgraceful and associated more than any other with irremediable dishonour. This was hanging, a hideous death, or more exactly a "formless" death [...], the extreme of defilement that one inflicted on oneself only in the utmost shame. It also turns out - but is it just chance? - that handing is a woman's way of death: Jocasta, Phaedra [in Euripides but not Racine], Leda, Antigone ended in this way, while outside tragedy there were deaths of innumerable young girls who hanged themselves, to give rise to a special cult or to illustrate the mysteries of female physiology. (pp. 9-10)

It is enough to recall that the name Haemon is only too like the word for blood (haima). In this way the son of Creon, pierced by his own sword, fulfills the prophecy of his own name and dies like a man. (p. 13)

No sooner have we recalled this difference between two modes of death, one male and the other female, than we are forced to admit that the distinction is in fact violated in the "virile" deaths of Deianira and Eurydice, who plunge swords into their bodies. (p. 14)


[On gender in Greek tragedy in general:] [I]f in tragedy male and female behavior can disregard the division of humanity into men and women, this shift is not an accident, since it serves to show how each character - whether by conformity or by deviation - lives out a destiny as an individual man or woman. There are dimensions of both reality and imagination to these lives, while the city would like to make them fundamentally a matter of social reality. (p. 20)


[On the spaces where women typically die:] [Women] are free enough to kill themselves, but they are not free enough to escape from the space to which they belong, and the remote sanctum where they meet their death is equally the symbol of their life - a life that finds its meaning outside the self and is fulfilled only in the institutions of marriage and maternity, which tie women to the world and lives of men. [...] The place where women kill themselves, to give it its name, is the marriage chamber, the thalamos. (p. 23)


[On Antigone as an exception to the rule that virgins in Greek tragedy are killed, rather than killing themselves:] [Antigone] was not content simply to kill herself, but killed herself in the manner of grieving wives, who hang themselves as a last resort. [...] Although he thought he had taken care not to engage his own personal responsibility and that of the state, Creon actually condemned Antigone to Hades, a young life offered as a victim to the gods below. Buried alive, the daughter of Oedipus was doomed to die by suffocation, and in making a noose of her virgin's veil she brought on suffocation by other means. She gained twice, by contriving her own death, and by condemning Creon to the defilement that he wanted to avoid. But the significance of this hanging is not exhausted in the gesture by which Antigone, faithful to the logic of Sophoclean heroines, chose to die by her own will and so to change execution into suicide. By killing herself in the manner of very feminine women, the girl found in her death a femininity that in her lifetime she had denied with all her being; she also found something like a marriage. (pp. 31-32)


[On death as 'marriage' for Antigone:] Antigone, who died for putting a dead brother before life as a spouse, was confronted in death with a marriage, whether she was expected to "find a husband in Hades," as Creon put it [Creon to Haemon in The Burial at Thebes: 'If she needs a husband, let Hades find her one' (Heaney, 2004, p. 30)], or was promised directly to the lord of the dead. Before dying she had given her husband in the underworld the name of Acheron [Heaney, 2004, p. 30], but in the messenger's speech it was Hades himself whom the young girl [...] found "in her nuptial chamber carved from the rock." [Heaney's version doesn't state this outright] So, dead in the arms of her betrothed Haemon, she is lost to him, but he will still kill himself to join her, driven by a frantic desire to wed her "in the house of Hades" [Again, Heaney's version is different: the Messenger refers to 'A wedding witnessed in the halls of death' (Heaney, 2004, p. 52)] (p. 38)


[On the exceptional status of Antigone in Greek tragedy:] The Antigone of Sophocles was glorious in her hybris, the only mortal to go down to the land of the dead of her own free will (autonomos). (pp. 47-48)









Last modified: Wednesday, 5 March 2025, 2:32 PM