Page 17 - GALIET THESMOPHORIAS and Euphorias IV

Galiet & Galiet
poetry? These are challenging questions facing an empire that is about to collapse, perhaps as challenging as they are in our times.
Aristophanes employs the comic device of ridicule to subvert comedy into tragedy and gender cross-dressing into socio-political nakedness: a meta- theatrics of meaning. Aristophanes uses Agathon for the purpose of seeking socio-political awareness and possibly reform for women’s irrational behaviour affects men and the wellbeing of the polis as a whole. By having a character such as Agathon, whose role is to act as an effeminate poet, he is asking the male audience to “place themselves in women’s shoes”: how does it feel to be second- class citizens, to be the object of vision and desire (as Taaffe suggests), to be passive sexually? The tragic aspect of this comedy is that Aristophanes has to resort to an enervated, effeminate, deceptive and emasculating character to represent what womanhood might be all about. Mnesilochus, on the other hand, plays the comic aspect of this role reversal. We witness the pathetic attempt to construct Mnesilochus as a female character on stage, one that although dressed in fine silks, man remains. This proves that, as much as they try, males, strictly by observation, cannot construct female identity, thus educating the men that although they are not responsible for the way women are, men, in Classical Greece and patristic societies, are partially responsible for women’s fearful, emotional reactions: injustice breeds injustice, revenge breeds revenge. Finally, the only way to attain peace in this play is for Euripides to negotiate. We know he negotiates with an ulterior motive, so that he may free his relative. But, nevertheless, it is a truce. He will no longer blaspheme against women. Aristophanes, by having Euripides accept censorship, contrary to Mac Dowell’s view8, shows in his play that men are too quick in their mistreatment of women:
“Men never speak a good word, never one, for the feminine gender, everyone says we’re a Plague, the source of all evils to man, war, dissention, and strife.” (Chorus, 353)
8 Mac Dowell thinks that Aristophanes uses the chorus to mock the delusions about female power and superiority.
• 17•