| Female Acts in Greek Tragedy Although Classical Athenian ideology did not permit women to exercise legal, economic, and social autonomy, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often represent them as influential social and moral forces in their own right. Scholars have struggled to explain this seeming contradiction. Helene Foley shows how Greek tragedy uses gender relations to explore specific issues in the development of the social, political, and intellectual life in the polis. She investigates three central and problematic areas in which tragic heroines act independently of men: death ritual and lamentation, marriage, and the making of significant ethical choices. Her anthropological approach, together with her literary analysis, allows for an unusually rich context in which to understand gender relations in ancient Greece. Helene P. Foley is Professor of Classics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides , coauthor of Women in the Classical World: Image and Text , and editor of Reflections of Women in Antiquity and of The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Princeton). |