Euripides and the Politics of Form by Victoria Wohl (review)

Victoria Wohl’s beautifully written, lucidly argued, and highly engaging Euripides and the Politics of Form, based on her 2011 Martin Lectures at Oberlin College, breaks new ground by understanding form as not only an aesthetic but also a political phenomenon, and by interpreting “Euripidean dramatic form” as “a kind of political content” (3) and mode of political thought. By “form” Wohl, following Aristotle, means “plot structure” (muthos). She is concerned to analyze a plot’s “internal organization, and the ligatures between its parts, its tempo and trajectory, recognitions and reversals, its ‘beginning, middle, and end,’” but she also focuses on such “formal resources” as “speeches and dialogue, monody and choral song, characterization, poetic language, visual spectacle” (ix–x). The only Aristotelian element of tragedy that Wohl avoids discussing is dianoia: she does not track the plays’ political ideas and themes but is interested in “the political thought implicit within their dramatic structures” (x), which often turns out to be their ideology. She argues convincingly for the impossibility of reading Euripides’ plays aesthetically without also reading them ideologically, redefining aesthetics to include political thought by means of poetry and showing how unproductive the opposition between formalist and historicist approaches is for the interpretation of Euripidean tragedy.

Wohl offers chapter-length readings of Electra, Ion, and Suppliants and shorter discussions of Alcestis, Helen, Trojan Women, Hecuba, and Orestes. Her interpretations are grounded in close reading, productive familiarity with a wide range of Euripidean scholarship, and an immanent, if understated, theoretical approach that owes much both to Aristotle’s formal analysis of tragedy in the Poetics and to Raymond Williams’ emphasis in Marxism and Literature (London and New York 1977) and Modern Tragedy (London 1966) on the inevitably political nature of the genre and his interpretive focus on “structures of feeling.” Wohl argues that “the relation between aesthetic and political form is mediated by affect” (xi). She demonstrates that the formal structure of a Euripidean tragedy “is not just a vehicle for political expression, but is itself a kind of political expression, an immanent engagement with the dilemmas and contradictions of life in the democratic polis” (5). Unlike scholars who understand Euripidean tragedy as “reflecting” contemporary Athenian political and social events, institutions, and values, Wohl sees the dramatic form of the plays as itself a kind of political thought, with specific plays in performance constituting, in effect, interventions in the politics of late fifth-century Athens through their formal and affective innovations.

To give just two examples: Wohl’s exceptionally rich reading of Ion demonstrates that the play’s structure is “an affective form conjured into being by the play’s aesthetic form, its lucky coincidences and chance encounters, its formal repetitions, the tempo of its long-awaited reunion between mother and son.” For Wohl Ion does not merely contain or depict ideology; in performance it “produces … through its psychagôgia new sentiments, new frameworks for thought and for action, the barely recognized ‘structures of feeling’ that constitute ideology.” The play “through its formal effects … makes its audience experience [ideology] right there in the real time of the performance. The dramatic experience is, quite literally, ideology at work” (137). Similarly, Wohl’s innovative reading of Suppliants explores how the play “us[es] tragic form to think about tragic form and its relation to political content; to explore its possibilities and its limitations as a mode of aesthetic and political representation.… Staging the birth of tragedy as a political institution, it suggests that tragedy produces political effect by way of its dramatic affect … the poetic and the political are inseparably fused, on the stage and in the soul of the viewer” (108–109).

This brief review cannot do justice to Wohl’s nuanced readings and her demonstration that form and politics are inseparable in Euripidean drama. Her outstanding book should be studied by anyone interested in the literary interpretation of Attic tragedy. It would gain strength by being read along...