Gender Politics and the Liminality of the Herculean Body Essay

Sophocless Women of Trachis11, however, deals solely with the tragic drama occurring on the mortal realm, devoid of any cosmic underpinnings. The play, like Heracles, can be shared into two portions. Unlike Heracles, however, Heracless world is divided not so much into the microcosmic and the macrocosmic, but into the masculine and feminine. This division is causal, serving to highlight the stress between the domestic world which values emotion, empathy, and feeling and the milling machineryic world which champions duty, honour, and glory. Despite the evident causality, however, the play is marked by Heracless and Deianeiras obviously implausible deaths, highlighting the illogical aspect of male and female relations as a whole even outside the striking of the inexplicable cosmic event. In both plays, the Herculean body is the locus of a female tension in which the female struggle at being pushed aside is foregrounded. In Sophocless play, Heracles acts like Lycus, ravaging a fo reign land in order to marry the kings daughter. Heracless inability to be restored into community due his insatiable appetite for women causes endless issues for Deianeira, as she is left at home wasting with desire like the mournful nightingale (107-8) in a strange household (41) for fifteen months without tidings (46). While the Euripidean hero is honourable and, as the play resolves itself, more and more an identifiable man, the Sophoclean suffering hero is repellent as well as distant (12 Silk)12. While Heracles acts out the heros pathos, thus, Women of Trachis views how the self-serving character of the Herculean hero can land suffering on the feminine realm by providing the audience with a point of sympathy from the female angle. Like Her... .... While Women of Trachis addresses the position of the feminine in a male-dominated warrior society on a microcosmic level, Heracles also highlights the feminine perspective, only on a macrocosmic level. Both plays, thus, foreground the pathos of the case-by-case in the grips of forces beyond their control when conflicting realms meet and erupt. Heracless body, in being a liminal space where definitions of the cosmic and divine are blurred, is the site where the unmarrieds larger struggle is acted out. Unlike Heracles, however, Women of Trachis proposes the idea that humanism cannot save the day unless the very definitions of what is means to be heroic are changed so the young, mixed-up and the female are taken into account. In order for the king to be a proper king, he has to leave behind his heroic, divine self and pack (Amphitryon) (as his) father (1265).