Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (review)

Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. By Helene P. Foley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001; pp. xi + 410. $39.50 cloth.

In this deeply thoughtful book, Helene Foley argues that Athenian tragic playwrights found gender a valuable tool for thinking about the social order and confronting intractable social and philosophical problems. Unlike readers who see in tragedy only validation of the Athenian sex-gender system, Foley sees tragedy raising questions and destabilizing accepted ideas. By aiming "to capture the strangeness and difference of Greek representations of cultural, historical, and ethical issues from our own" (337), Foley locates the plays she studies in their specific social and historical context.

Foley's approach is eclectic, drawing on a remarkable range of scholarship that includes art and archaeology, feminist theory, anthropology, and ancient and modern philosophy. She does justice to the views of others while remaining critical. Her readings are solidly grounded in the texts, and she makes deft use of comparison with Homer, other forms of drama, and other types of social organization. Foley's stance is comprehensive and non-reductive; she acknowledges that tragedy both questions and produces/reinforces Athenian ideology. She also recognizes different possible readings, makes judgments when she thinks the meaning is clear, and can even admit at one point that "I remain uncertain" (237). Her arguments are full of detail yet accessible to nonclassicists because of clear organization and useful overviews. To theatre practitioners and scholars, this book will be valuable even--or especially--when Foley's discussion reveals how different the original issues were from those likely to be addressed by contemporary productions.

The core of the book is a discussion of female agency in the six chapters of part III. Many female characters in tragedy make important moral choices, but because Greek women were ideally not supposed to take action for themselves, the depiction of these choices offers an alternative mode of ethical decision-making. Stressing tragedy's depiction of moral choice in specific situations, she aligns this depiction with contemporary post-Kantian philosophy which, in evaluating decision-making, includes considerations of context--community, social position, emotion, audience--rather than judgment solely based on universal principles.

Foley brilliantly analyzes passages in which a character "sees herself as taking deliberate action for which she is willing to be held accountable" (17), and she offers a definition of moral agency that works best with self-conscious, articulate, intellectual debates, such as those of Antigone (III.3), Clytemnestra in Agamemnon (III.4), and Medea (III.5). In III.3 Foley argues that Creon's position has often been seen as clearer and stronger than Antigone's because his commitment to general principles as the major determinant of moral action coupled with his rejection of emotion and nonrational perception are in accord with the dominant strain in Western thought. Antigone, on the other hand, argues from a more specific and limited context and changes her argument depending on her audience. Foley concludes that the play suggests that "both justice and care should ideally play a role in both public and private ethics" (195).

I have learned a great deal from this book, yet I question some of its strategies and conclusions. First, the formal, tonal, and ideological differences between plays and playwrights sometimes get less emphasis than they deserve. At times, for example in the excellent discussion of Aeschylus's "case against Clytemnestra" (204-34), ideology is foregrounded; at others, such as in the discussion of Cassandra's role as better "wife" than Clytemnestra to Agamemnon (92-4), it fades into the background. This is especially true when the analysis ranges across several plays (for example, in the discussion of concubines 87-105).

Second, Foley's focus on clear, self-conscious, verbally articulate decision-making by women who are "autonomous moral agents" leads her to downplay other situations in which less obviously rebellious female behavior raises important questions. For example, in his Electra Euripides portrays a Clytemnestra who regrets her murder of Agamemnon and tries to...