Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece

7. No More Weaving: The Poetics of Interruption

No More Weaving: The Poetics of Interruption The loom connects me with the sacred mountains And the Song connects me with my mother. —A Navajo woman Interrupted Task, Interrupted Life A famous Attic red-figure bell krater in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York depicts Persephone rising from the Underworld to join her mother with Hecate guiding her with torches. Another vase, from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, shows Pandora emerging from the earth to meet Epimetheus, her future husband. Holding a hammer in his right hand, he embodies the image of the providing worker, while a winged Eros hovers above them. The return to the mother in one scene is juxtaposed with the movement toward the husband of the motherless woman in the other. Torches and the winged Eros are among the iconography of wedding scenes.1 The bride of Hades and the first mortal woman and bride are represented in a moment in which space and time break their boundaries in a vertical line. The vase iconography captures the sense of a shared identity between two worlds, while emphasizing the moment of transition from one phase to the other. Such scenes provide a visual record and framework for the moment of interruption of one stage and the beginning of a new life. Early Greek poetry projects the moment of interruption, the abrupt suspension of a woman’s work, as a device that not only marks the movement from one point in the narrative to another but also highlights from the poetics point of view the intergeneric dialogue in oral traditional material that presents fluidity and movement from one genre and performance context to another. Routine can be interrupted by death or exile, as we saw in the earlier chapters, but also by a wedding. The underlying notion of an external force abruptly affecting work Chapter 7 No More Weaving 183 rhythms and routine is portrayed even in the idealized weaving scenes. The stylization of the moment of interruption is a static representation underlying violent and sudden changes that are present in poetry through the representation of interrupted tasks. Persephone’s abduction is centered on what is perceived as the pivotal moment in the story: the interruption of the young woman’s flower picking with close friends in a choral setting. In similar terms, funerary epigrams rhetorically stylize praise of a woman’s virtue by focusing on the woman’s suddenly leaving her weaving. The interruption of a domestic task as a motif signals a closure in a funerary context but becomes the point of departure for a new beginning in a different context. The interruption of Persephone’s task moves the narrative Bell-krater (bowl for mixing wine and water), depicting the return of Persephone, ca. 440 BCE. Terracotta, height 16 1 ⁄8 in. (41cm); diameter of mouth 17 7 ⁄8 in. Attributed to the Persephone painter. Classical Greek, Attic. Fletcher Fund, 1928 (28.57.23). Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.© The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Red-figure wine-mixing vessel or volute-crater depicting the birth of Pandora with Zeus, Hermes, and Epimetheus, ceramic, Athenian, 5th century BC. Location: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Ashmolean Museum / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. No More Weaving 185 and its main character to a new phase, marks the movement from youth to adulthood , blurs the spatial boundaries of earth and the Underworld, and bridges the transition from maidenhood to womanhood. Conversely, in the Odyssey Penelope’s routine is a constant weaving and unweaving , but with no moment of interruption that abruptly changes the course of things and brings about some cathartic resolution. While Penelope’s perennial weaving highlights her unwillingness to choose a suitor as a new husband but also the constant movement between a gesture toward a new beginning and a return to previous life, the moment of breach of one task is interlaced with the representation of a definitive change in personal circumstances. Right before the slaughter of the suitors, Telemachus asks his mother to go to her chamber and her tasks, the loom and the distaff (21.350–51). The loom and the distaff are used once again as the visual representation not just of the gender division but even more of routine. Although most of the scholarship has approached scenes of weaving from a gender point of view, weaving, as noted in earlier chapters...