Page 10 - GALIET THESMOPHORIAS and Euphorias IV

Galiet & Galiet
in which direction the culprits have escaped saying, in utter despair, “O dear, O dear” while the chorus mocks him: “merrily, merrily, merrily on to your own confusion go” (366).
The play constitutes a series of confusing meta-linguistic moments that violate and transgress female boundaries: males penetrate the sacred realm of female fertility by entering, as spectators, into the sacred rituals of the Thesmophoria. It is Agathon and Mnesilochus, and lastly, Euripides who transgress this boundary between the masculine and feminine by cross-dressing and cross-acting: an all- seeing eye into the mysteries of the feminine funnel. Yet, from the very beginning of the play, we feel we enter into a surreal world in which we sense a profound sense of displacement; we can palpate the insecurities and alienations that Athenians might have felt in their topsy-turvy vortex. Euripides warns Mnesilochus that “he is not to hear the things which he shall see and not see the things which he shall hear” (331). I find this perplexing parallelism on “seeing” and “hearing” riddling and fascinating. It is psychical. It confuses us, it whirls inside our gray matter, and it tells us to mistrust our senses as if deep voices were telling us that what we are about to see and hear is not what it seems: the play is other 3⁄4 doubt, tragedy and labyrinth.
If we assume that “the things” is to be interpreted as the “women”, we can easily deduce that “men are not to hear the women that they see and not see the women they hear.” How are we to interpret this? Of the endless interpretations that may be given at any one time, I suggest that Aristophanes crept into its audience’s mind a medallion with artful grace and subtlety: women as objects are not to be heard, but as non-objects they ought to be heard. This is particularly relevant when, within the same period, 411, Aristophanes presents its audience with Lysistrata thus inculcating a new female ideal: the self-sufficient heroine. Moreover, Aristophanes delights us with certain lines or ecstasies of the flesh precisely to remind and make us question antiquated notions of femininity: Ether, the great mother, he says, implants in the heads of all living creatures, the Eye that mimics the Sun to give vision and bears the funnel of the ear to give hearing (331). I ask myself, what is the purpose of this mini-story? Tracks. Why did Aristophanes need to include Ether, the female, as the great mother in
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