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

3. Work and Performance in Captivity

Work and Performance in Captivity Voices sang in the evenings hammock songs to the air. Hopeful words—hunger sounds: sorrow, love, and despair. And nearby bled the trees in the forest of pines. —From Luisa Moreno, “On the Road” Work in Captivity: Becoming a Hostage of War When creating an oral text, the bard’s talent in amplification of a textual kernel determines the success of the narrative. What someone would say in one or two sentences in an everyday setting takes more time, nuance, and color for a professional to present. Genres of speech or song are in this way transposed and idealized. In the process of a well-registered genre of performance, such as the lament, its textualization in a different context, as part of a larger epic narrative, requires a certain level of assemblage. Oral texts are circulated, re-used, reduced, or expanded according to the conventions of the genre that receives them as the new textual field. Certain markers make the new entextualization possible. In the mind of the epic poet, lament and female work go together in the presentation of the female speech act. The marker of female work as a signal for a subsequent female speech act appears again at the end of book 6 of the Iliad, when Hector is looking for his wife, who has gone outside her home. When he does not find her, he first asks the servants where she could be. As he wonders whether she is with the other women who went to Athena’s temple to supplicate the goddess, one servant responds, designated by a descriptive epithet that refers to her working role in the house. The servant is given a distinctive role; she is referred to as the busy house manager. As the work theme and the woman’s role in the Trojan Chapter 3 Work and Performance in Captivit y 79 household are underlined, the speech act toward Hector is also marked as mythos (6.381). Τὸν δ’ αὖτ’ ὀτρηρὴ ταμίη πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπεν· “Ἕκτορ ἐπεὶ μάλ’ ἄνωγας ἀληθέα μυθήσασθαι, οὔτέ πῃ ἐς γαλόων οὔτ’ εἰνατέρων ἐϋπέπλων οὔτ’ ἐς Ἀθηναίης ἐξοίχεται, ἔνθά περ ἄλλαι Τρῳαὶ ἐϋπλόκαμοι δεινὴν θεὸν ἱλάσκονται, ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ πύργον ἔβη μέγαν Ἰλίου, οὕνεκ’ ἄκουσε τείρεσθαι Τρῶας, μέγα δὲ κράτος εἶναι Ἀχαιῶν. ἣ μὲν δὴ πρὸς τεῖχος ἐπειγομένη ἀϕικάνει μαινομένῃ ἐϊκυῖα· ϕέρει δ’ ἅμα παῖδα τιθήνη.” (6.381–89) Then a willing housekeeper spoke to him, saying: “Hector, since you urgently command us to tell you true, neither is she gone to any of your sisters or your brothers’ fair-robed wives, nor to the shrine of Athene, where the other fairtressed Trojan women are seeking to propitiate the dread goddess; but she went to the great hall of Ilios, because she heard that the Trojans were hard pressed, and great victory rested with the Achaeans. So she has gone in haste to the wall, like one beside herself; and with her the nurse is carrying the child.” The servant informs Hector of the whereabouts of his wife, who is off to the great wall of Troy, and by doing so gives us a formulaic yet ideologically revealing reference. She presents Andromache as a woman in madness, mainomenē. One woman referring to another as “appearing mad” and beyond herself is not a light reference. By applying such a distinct characterization that captures her mistress ’s state of mind, the speaker places Andromache as a figure who functions outside the set of expected norms for female behavior in epic discourse. Andromache’s speech act in turn is presented as a lament. When the poet describes her, she is weeping, and it is in her capacity as a lamenter that she addresses Hector. Consistent with this view, after her encounter with Hector she begins a formal lament with the other Trojan women, lamenting the fate of Hector even though he is still alive. The genre of lament becomes the marker of Andromache’s speech act. As Worman has pointed out, Andromache uses a mournful, self-referential tone that marks her as a “paradigmatic widow.”1 From the narrative’s point of view, since Hector is still alive, her address to her husband is prophetic. From the point of view of epic discourse it is revolutionary. Andromache is outside, not in the expected position, and as the servant informed Hector , she resembles a madwoman (6.388). There is no prior reference to work as 80 voices at work Andromache’s speech act unfolds; instead, Hector will return her to her place after their encounter when he orders her to return to her weaving. Lamentation here becomes the other channel through which female speech finds an outlet in traditional Iliadic poetics. The aftermath of the scene emphasizes Andromache’s lamentlike speech act, in which she launches into...