Critical Euripides: intersecting hierarchies in Hecuba, Andromache, and Troades

Thesis

This thesis examines social hierarchies in Euripides’ Hecuba, Andromache, and Troades. Inserting itself into recent debates on the ideological operations of Euripidean tragedy, it offers new perspectives by exploring hierarchies of gender, class, and ethnicity in these three tragedies, and argues that they can be best examined together. In particular, the thesis analyses how these seemingly distinct hierarchies are ideologically enmeshed and mutually supporting, to the point at times of becoming virtually indistinguishable from each other, even when they are seemingly colliding. I argue that they can be best understood as part of one ideological ‘matrix’ or ‘structure’, which is deconstructed by these three tragedies. From the thesis, these plays emerge as particularly ‘critical’, and this criticism can be contextualised as ideological without losing sight of the aesthetic and affective features of the plays. The tragedian’s critique, it is argued, can be best understood as a re-reading of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. By envisioning these tragedies as re-opening tensions seemingly closed by the trilogy, it offers an interpretation of them as particularly critical of hierarchies—social, linguistic, moral, and even aesthetic. Understanding Euripides’ critical re-reading of the Oresteia as both ideological and aesthetic, it offers fresh insights into the relationship between form and ideology, which emerge as co-constituted, and therefore inseparable. The thesis delineates its own original understanding of ideological critique through which Euripides’ critical movement can be better understood and which circumvents the postcritical emphasis on the division between intellectual scepticism and aesthetic experience. Finally, by understanding Hecuba, Andromache, and Troades as enacting and reflecting a deep crisis of ideology, it argues that they offer a valuable model to theorise the ideological interaction and interconnection between hierarchies.

Authors: Gargano, V

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-2anqbpy9z
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: intersectionality; Greek tragedy; ideology; Euripides
• Subjects: Classical Languages and Literature