Clytemnestra’s Net: Aeschylus’ Oresteia and the Text of Tapestries

Spring 2008 41 Clytemnestra’s Net: Aeschylus’ Oresteia and the Text of Tapestries Megan Shea Ripe with incarnations of the Greek word telos (meaning in its variations: end, sacrifice, goal), the Oresteia, not surprisingly, engenders teleological readings from its scholars. Particularly in the case of gender, such readings take a typical stance in lambasting Aeschylus for creating a trilogy that promotes a restoration of patriarchy. Froma Zeitlin, in her article “The Dynamics of Mythology: Myth and Mythmaking inAeschylus’Oresteia,” most famously traces the progression of social forces in the trilogy from the “matriarchy” of the monstrous Clytemnestra to the “patriarchy” of the male-bornAthena’s democracy.1 Subsequent readings have followed her work,2 causing much of feminist scholarship surrounding the Oresteia to take up the same plot derived, theme based evidence as fact-citing performative moments only to reinforce the teleological reading originating from Zeitlin. Her article, a breakthrough in feminist scholarship, has subsequently become a fixed entity, producing a wealth of similar methods of interpretation. Feminist classical scholarship especially has ignored the terms that evaluation of the performance spectacle can offer. My task is to reverse this trend; exploring the trilogy though its performative moments, I use language and props to re-imagine the spectacle of the Oresteia. One of the strongest visual moments in Greek tragedy occurs when Clytemnestra lures Agamemnon to his death by persuading him to walk into the palace on delicate tapestries. Naturally, the tapestry section of Agamemnon has generated a tremendous amount of discourse in classical scholarship, though the tapestry has not been evaluated as a prop within a performance.Andrew Sofer’s book The Stage Life of Props describes a prop as “something an object becomes, rather than something an object is.”3 In a society without industrial manufacturing, the cultural significance of the object outside of its stage meaning may yield a tension in the object’s becoming a prop. The prop presented cannot be artificial; in other words, unlike props today, it is not something of lesser value meant to represent something that is fine. Instead, the work must be the fine thing itself, woven perhaps by many women in preparation for its one time use in the production. The tapestry Megan Shea is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre Arts at Cornell University, where she is completing her dissertation, “Antigone’s Daughters: Revolutions in Kinship and Performance.” Her research areas include women in ancient Greece, performance in ancient Greece, kinship, visual studies, and contemporary feminist performance and theatre. A director and actor, Megan is the first Ph.D. student to participate in Cornell’s newly created Advanced Graduate Training Program in Directing. 42 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism is a liminal entity that signifies in the process of its becoming a prop, which in this case means that the prop signifies in the process of its ruination by Agamemnon. But what is being ruined here? Because weaving in ancient Greece was women’s work, the prop itself would be connected to women. And the ruination of the tapestry would signify the ruination of women’s work, leading possibly to the idea of the ruination of women. In this essay, I offer an alternative feminist perspective: concentrating on the construction of the feminine through materiality, I argue that the tapestry creates a connection between textiles and women, which reverberates throughout the trilogy as a representation of women’s plight. Thinking about women’s representations in Athenian performance means thinking about the audience as well. Although women were probably permitted to attend religious festivals such as City Dionysia,4 they still suffered severe restrictions under patriarchalAthens at the time of the Oresteia’s presentation (458 BCE). Wives especially, it seems, were subject to the whims of men. Evidence suggests that most of the time wives were required to stay at home, both as part of their work, and as a social custom. They were to obey the will of their guardians, or kyrioi: women’s fathers, husbands, or closest male relatives (including their sons).5 FemaleAthenian citizens were confined to the home because they were the only women in Athens who could bear legal...