Between song and silence: Gender and communication in the plays of Euripides.

Recent scholarship concerning gendered speech in Greek tragedy has posed the question whether tragic women converse in female speech. This dissertation focuses on Euripides, well known for his interest in women. I examine specific modes of communication that Euripides reserves for women: song, silences, intimate conversations, and apologies. Often these modes of communication occur in gendered spaces, the definition of which I extend to include sex-exclusive communication. Tragic song has traditionally been analyzed as exaggerated emotion, but is better understood as a specialized form of communication for Euripidean women. Song is an aural focalizer that invites the spectator to see through the singer's eyes. It is a register of high intensity in situations of powerlessness, providing an extra-rational connection to what is absent or invisible, whether this is memory, fantasy, or the supernatural. Through song, women signal transitional moments, express resistance, reveal knowledge to an avid male listener, or interrogate a male speaker. Contrarily, male lyric indicates a potentially demasculinizing crisis or condition, such as physical pain, grief, indecision, or immaturity. Euripidean women observe certain types of silences. In contrast to Euripidean men whose silences are preludes to persuasive speeches, female silences involve the keeping of private secrets. Female choruses who swear to keep silent women's secrets are motivated by female solidarity. Even when the revealing of potentially scandalous personal secrets might be expected to elicit female gossip, female choruses express their sympathy to a heroine through intimate conversations in a female space. This kind of interaction is never available to Euripidean men. Some Euripidean women find themselves in a male space and apologize for speaking, in deference to the social expectation that women should not be heard in public. Euripides makes his female characters sound like women by reserving particular modes of communication for them. His women imitate real women; at the same time, by interacting in community crises, they represent problems that are important to a male audience. By having his women struggle to control communicative space---fluctuating from being innocent to becoming destructive---Euripides drowns his audience in conflicting reactions and sympathies.PhDAncient languagesClassical literatureCommunication and the ArtsLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesTheaterWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132097/2/9959725.pd