G. Thompson
In Wednesday's class, we introduced Lysistrata in the context of the physical dimensions of the ancient Greek theater, talked a little about the political and military context, and discussed briefly four scenes (not formally marked as such), stopping with the scene in which the women express the desire to go home (and get laid). There are a few videos of staged performances of the play from various local theaters or college productions, and I'd like to make use of parts of these today, to get at the tone of a modern production. (It's definitely not a respectful undertaking.) The question these raise more visibly is this: how seriously can we make a case for Lysistrata as a protest play, either about patriarchy or war or their entwinement, when you have farcical qualities visibly before you? Or maybe farce is the best weapon against continual war?
Lysistrata is an example of Old Comedy, which (as Wikipedia notes) was highly topical, and which was influential for later writers such as Rabelais in allowing political critique disguised as buffoonery. In Old Comedy the comic actors wore grotesque masks and other bodily enhancements . . . scatological and sexual humor were standard. Athens had been at war with Sparta for 21 years, and two years previously had suffered a serious defeat in Sicily. So the premise, that women are tired of the long war, is certainly plausible. Old Comedy featured implausible plots, easy shifts in time and location, references to the audience, theater, and occasion, occasional irreverence toward the gods and direct smacks at political leaders.
Kenneth Dover, quoted in Columbia post (below):
"The essential spirit of Old Comedy is the ordinary man's protest—using his inalienable weapons, humour and fantasy—against all who are in some way stronger or better than he: gods, politicians, generals, artists, and intellectuals." The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization. Oxford University Press, 1998.
Core Curriculum from Columbia Univ.
This connects with the notion of carnival in Bakhtin: carnival according to Bakhtin starts off as a period of licensed inversion of social mores, in which the ordinary people are permitted to caricature and mock authorities. It comes from folk humor, and according to Bakhtin is “a boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations [which] opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture.”
Three forms of folk culture under discussion: Ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions, and various genres of billingsgate (the translator's inspired word for excessive verbal denunciations, of the sort engaged in by Falstaff and Hal in I Henry IV). Carnival breaks down divisions, so it's natural for theater in this mode to break the fourth wall (which didn't exist in Greece anyway).
Carnival stresses materiality--emphasis upon bodily functions, with a kind of grotesque realism. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Western culture gradually excluded carnival as part of Great Literature, consigning it to popular forms.
[T]he historical institution of carnival and its related popular-festive forms become the key for unlocking a crucial theme of European cultural, social and personal history from the Middle Ages onwards. In this view, the Renaissance sees the flowering of a gay, affirmative, and militantly anti-authoritarian attitude to life, founded upon a joyful acceptance of the materiality of the body . . . Subsequent European history witnesses the fragmentation of that whole attitude, indeed its suppression and dispersal, under the baleful influences of rationalism and modernity from the 17th-c. onwards (Rabelais and His World 66).
Carnival then is generalized to other sorts of social inversions. On the one hand, it is incorporated into official functions such as parades, official ceremonies, sporting events, and other spectacles, carefully controlled so as to marginalize disruptions. On the other, there's still that substrate of rebellion which cannot be controlled or entirely suppressed (though North Korea comes pretty close).
“The attractions of this whole position are plain. One immediate advantage is that it gives a name, carnival or the carnivalesque, to a range of otherwise dispersed activities and cultural forms which can now be seen to have real and historical connections” (70).
Any novel is likely to bring together a variety of social registers, from socially high to low, in an extended dialogue with each other, producing an interesting and sometimes explosive mixture. This social mixture is termed carnival, and it shares characteristics with other, non-literary carnivals. Because carnivals offer a protected space wherein normal social order is suspended, everyone can speak freely in a kind of participatory play. Activities which are ordinarily taboo are carried out with abandon, taboo words are spoken with gusto, creating a kind of grotesque realism or celebration of the body, including all the naughty bits.
Discourses of control like to keep carnival under repression, denying all those bits that we ordinarily don’t discuss in settings like this one, the behaviors you have to clean up when your pet does them in the house. “Nice dog.” “Bad dog.” Being a Nice Dog all the time means that some aspects of humanity are denied, pushed away, etc., and societies don’t do well if that happens all the time. So carnival serves as a safety valve, allowing people to blow off some steam.
Contemporary versions of carnival, in addition to Mardi Gras: post-World Series parties, spectacles such as the Super Bowl, Halloween (esp. Devils Night), some New Year’s Eve events, rock concerts, and so on.
So what aspects of Lysistrata are carnivalesque?
Sexual references: leather dildos, men's phalluses, acknowledgment of sexual desire.
General sense of disorder: the socially lower--mostly women--rise up in rebellion against the socially superior. This comes out particularly when Lysistrata bests the magistrate in debate: the magistrate is a voice for order and control, and ends up being dressed as a woman and is chased off in disgrace.
Cross-dressing: men playing women's parts, gender roles subverted.
Phases of the play discussed last week:
Group 1--pp. 141-150. The women come together, hear Lysistrata's plan, and agree to take an oath.
Group 2--pp. 150-56. Men arrive with pots of fire to break into the Acropolis; conflict with the women.
Group 3--pp. 156-65. Arrival of the Magistrate, conflict between him and Lysistrata.
Group 4--pp. 156-72 Conflict with men; dispute reported between Lysistrata and women who want to go home.
From there:
--pp. 172-80, the cocktease part, between Cinesias and Myrrhine
--pp. 180-86, Spartan enters, chorus gives an update on effects of the boycott (girlcott?). This could be combined with the previous section, as there's more enticement going on.
--186-93, Lysistrata comes out to negotiate. The woman Reconciliation enters--conclusion and dance.
Is this play really a subversive challenge to men's authority? Or does the reconciliation undercut that idea, as a) the women return to being under men's authority, and b) they achieve resolution by offering an image of a woman who is parceled out in various body parts?
It appears that the very idea of women's autonomy is treated here as comic.
Contesting men's authority is also going to be a theme--treated very differently--in Major Barbara.
Jeffrey Henderson:
Insofar as the release was motivated by acceptable civic ideals (peace and solidarity) and achieved in humorous fantasy (wives determining policy), it was safe and festive, cohesive rather than divisive. But insofar as it was a valid expression of people’s real war-weariness and an expression of social discontent that had no other public outlet, it was also fair warning to the people’s leaders that public patience might not last indefinitely. (Henderson 36)
Quoted in Shuyang Cynthia Luo, "Women and War: Power Play from Lysistrata to the Present." Honors thesis, Univ. of Connecticut digital commons.
Also: “By using women as his heroic voices, Aristophanes could admonish and advise the Athenians from an unpartisan direction (the private world), and in case the spectators should be offended they would have to admit that it was only a woman talking” (Henderson 37).
Interestingly, our translation changes what may be a key point. On 185 we have this:
Hail, bravest of all women! To your charms all Greeks surrender!
Now be awesome, gentle, noble, common, proud, experienced, tender:
The two great warring states now share the joint determination
To submit all points of quarrel to your binding arbitration.
Here's how another translation puts it:
Hail, most virile of women! Summon up all your experience:
Be terrible and tender,
lofty and lowbrow,
severe and demure.
Here stand the Leaders of Greece, enthralled by your
charm. (Parker 444).
Bravest or virile? Perhaps our translator is softening the sexism a bit.
One thing that is happening in this play is that women's bodies become weapons, rhetorically if not literally. For example, Lampito is "absolutely ravishing," though Lysistrata goes on to mention her "rippling muscles." Here's how another translation puts it:
Hello Lampito,
my dear friend from Sparta. How beautiful
you look, so sweet, such a fine complexion.
And your body looks so fit, strong enough
to choke a bull.
Weaponizing sex: see 146--
How? Well, just imagine. We're at home, beautifully made up, and we walk around the house wearing sheer lawn shifts and nothing else; the men are all horny and can't wait to leap on us; and we keep our distance and refuse to come to them--then they'll make peace soon enough, you'll see.
We see this in action later with Myrrhine and Cinesias.
Though it may be a bit dangerous to ask this, isn't it the case that women still use sexual attractiveness as one of the main instruments of power? Thinking here of celebrities (Beyonce, Angelita Jolie, others--or going back a couple of decades, Madonna) . . . There's a masculine version of this as well, but men have more direct avenues to social power.
So if the women are using sexual attractiveness and the withholding of sex to modify public policy, how are we to feel about that? Does this only reinforce the stereotyping in the process?
It's interesting that Lysistrata rebuts the magistrate by literally making him into a woman.
the Baruch College video:
Segments to view:
Opening, 1:45 to oath, about 15:00
53:00 or so, Cinesias (first with Lysistrata, then Myrrhine)
57:00 Myrrhine's entrance, until
1:15 or so--Reconciliation's entrance
This one is more farcical than some.
Compare the Lone Brick Co. version
Myrrhine's entrance about 1:10
Warwick student classics society:
53:00 or so--the reconciliation scene.
This production freely swaps genders . . .
Loyola Univ. New Orleans, 2004 version--
48:00 or so, Myrrhine and Cinesias
1:04 or so--Reconciliation