"O, he is wounded; I thank the Gods for't!"
I had a boss who once told me that America started "going down the crapper" when women got the vote. He said politics should be about money and war, and those are a man's issues. Upon first glance, Coriolanus would seem to agree with him. It is a play that opens with economic outrage, and depicts the glories and horrors of war. One would assume in such a play that perhaps the most significant (and the most villainous) character would be a man. One would be mistaken.
When we first meet Volumnia, she does not strike us as either reprehensible or noteworthy, as we come to find her just moments later. The stage directions dictate that she is sitting on a "low stool" with Virgilia, sewing. Her speech is in prose, to start. All these elements are set to give us the impression of a meager woman, without much influence. Very soon into her speech, in fact, in her second sentence, we are given a hint of things to come. "If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honor than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love." (I.iii. 2-5) This speech sets a theme. As the scene continues, Volumnia takes unabashed joy in her son's triumphs in war. It seems almost fetish-like, her lust for word of blood. When Virgilia recoils at the thought of blood, Volumnia doesn't hesitate to extol its virtues:
" It more becomes a man
that gilt his trophy. The breasts of Hecuba
When she did suckle Hector looked not lovelier than Hector's forehead when it spilt forth blood
At Grecian sword, contemning.--"
(I.iii. 40-44)
This is a hideous image, and one wonders how any person, especially a mother, cou...
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...d to be reminded of the foulness in her actions.
Volumnia is, in my onion, one of the most repulsive characters Shakespeare has ever conceived. To create her, and place in a world of men, a world of war, where she becomes impervious to the standard means of vengeance is brilliant. But she is so distasteful because she is so influential. She is the only person Coriolanus, our title character, can ever hear. But what else would you expect with Volume in her name?
"Coriolanus and His Mother" by Rufus Putney. From Twentieth Century Interpretations of Coriolanus ed. James E. Phillips. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc. 1970) 104-105
A.C. Bradley, Coriolanus. (The Folcroft Press, 1912) 11-12.
Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human. (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc. 1998) 577-587
Cole's article is not to attack Aristotle on his views of where a woman should be placed within the social and political order, in accordance to the Classic Greek period. Her intrigue is within "surveying some central values of that particular social and political institution," (Sterba 79). At first she begins with Aristotle's view on gender and class in ethics. Making a definite point among the social/political class, ancient Greek women and slaves were only allowed their male citizens to think for them. Being dependent on men silences the women and slaves without a voice to speak out, for the women work while the men socialize with others, the men assume that the women do not need a voice. According to Aristotle, even a woman's virtue is to be subservient to all males. As a part of common life the woman is considered the pack horse and the mother to raise the children, for the men. With all the work that women put into their specific households, some education and training would mature from the experience. It was thought again by Aristotle within; Deliberation, Education, and Emancipation, that woman did not possess the aptitude for practical reasoning. For whomever possessed practical reasoning carried with them authority on their decisions and the action pending. From these three classic Greek examples of how women were considered mentally and treated physically, the author Cole provides a progressive outlook of how women could have gained social and political power in a society of male dominant figures.
Yet, despite the fact that no two women in this epic are alike, each—through her vices or virtues—helps to delineate the role of the ideal woman. Below, we will show the importance of Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, Clytaemestra, and Penelope in terms of the movement of the narrative and in defining social roles for the Ancient Greeks. Before we delve into the traits of individual characters, it is important to understand certain assumptions about women that prevailed in the Homeric Age. By modern standards, the Ancient Greeks would be considered a rabidly misogynistic culture. Indeed, the notoriously sour Boetian playwright Hesiod-- who wrote about fifty years before Homer-- proclaimed "Zeus who thunders on high made women to be evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil (Theogony 600).
Over the course of time, the roles of men and women have changed dramatically. As women have increasingly gained more social recognition, they have also earned more significant roles in society. This change is clearly reflected in many works of literature, one of the most representative of which is Plautus's 191 B.C. drama Pseudolus, in which we meet the prostitute Phoenicium. Although the motivation behind nearly every action in the play, she is glimpsed only briefly, never speaks directly, and earns little respect from the male characters surrounding her, a situation that roughly parallels a woman's role in Roman society of that period. Women of the time, in other words, were to be seen and not heard. Their sole purpose was to please or to benefit men. As time passed, though, women earned more responsibility, allowing them to become stronger and hold more influence. The women who inspired Lope de Vega's early seventeenth-century drama Fuente Ovejuna, for instance, rose up against not only the male officials of their tiny village, but the cruel (male) dictator busy oppressing so much of Spain as a whole. The roles women play in literature have evolved correspondingly, and, by comparing The Epic of Gilgamesh, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Wife of Bath's Prologue, we can see that fictional women have just as increasingly as their real-word counterparts used gender differences as weapons against men.
Lysistrata, on the contrary shows women acting bravely and even aggressively against men who seem resolved on ruining the city- state by prolonging a pointless and excessively expending reserves stored in the Acropolis. The men being away at war would come home when they could, sexually relieve them selves and then leave again to precede a meaningless war. The women challenge the masculine role model to preserve traditional way of life in the community. When the women become challenged themselves they take on the masculine characteristics and defeat the men physically, mentally but primarily strategically. Proving that neither side benefits from it, just that one side loses more than the other. It gives the impression that the women are heroes and the men are ignorant, which contradicts what Euripides said but is chiefly written to entertain.
She fully embraces her masculinity, as she triumph over his lifeless body, and speaks exultantly of her victory "fallen thus, he gasped away his life, and as he breathed forth quick spurts of blood, he struck me with dark drops of gory dew; while I rejoiced no less than the sown earth is gladdened in heaven's refreshing rain at the birth time of the flower buds"(1389- 1402). She arrogantly concludes that her actions are just and that justice has been served in Agamemnon murder. With glee and delight she proudly announces to the chorus of Agamemnon death, "you are testing me as if I were a witless woman. But my heart does not quail, and I say to you who know it well and whether you wish to praise or to blame me, it is all one here is Agamemnon, my husband, now a corpse, the work of this right hand, a just workman” (1402-1405). However, the chorus does not agree with what the queen has done and shows their anger with her actions, "you, pathetic- the king had just returned from battle. You waited out the war and fouled his lair, you planned my great commander's fall" (1625-1627). The chorus feels that Clytemnestra has only wronged Agamemnon, rather than accomplishing justice she only perpetuates to the circle of violence that has riddled the family, “violence beget violence”. In their opinion, she is
...herself as a man and has misogynistic tendencies. Fortunately, the role of women in society today has changed very much from the roles that they played in classical mythology. Women are now seen as being able to play any role they desire, whether it is the role of a housewife or the role of a workingwoman with a successful career. It is no surprise that achieving the roles that women play today took such a long time when for so long even in mythology women’s roles in society were constantly pushed in the direction of domestics and when for so long women were portrayed as less then pleasant creatures. The fact that these sorts of roles were pushed on women in the Greco-Roman society was proof enough that it was a patriarchal society. It is astoundingly wonderful that the roles that women play in modern society have evolved so much since the times of classical myths.
Was taken from the house of Laius as a young child and left in the mountains with his feet bound together
One can hardly deny that in Euripides’ plays women are often portrayed as weak, uncertain, and torn between what they must do and what they can bring themselves to do. Other women appear to be the root of grave evils, or simply perpetrators of heinous crimes. In a day when analysis of characters and plot had yet to be invented, it is easy to see why he might have been thought to be very much against women. However, when looking back with current understanding of what Euripides was doing at the time, armed with knowledge of plot devices and Socratic philosophy, this argument simply does not hold up. In fact, a very strong argument can be made to the opposite, that Euripides was in fact very much in support of women’s rights, and thought they were treated unfairly.
In Act 5, she uses Coriolanus’ love for his family when she asks “Alas, how can we for our country pray, / Whereto we are bound, together with thy victory, / Whereto we are bound?”(5.3.107-9) to lead Coriolanus into believing that he will “show a noble grace to both parts”(5.3.121) by making peace. Then he dies attempting to be the hero no both sides and his mother ends up being the hero to Rome and cheered by all the city. Menenius even says that, “This Volumnia is worth of consuls, senators, patricians”(5.4.53) at which time a woman couldn’t be held in such a high regard. At a male-dominated time, she couldn’t achieve power on her own: she gained everything through manipulating her son (intentionally or not). It also interesting that Coriolanus’ father is left out in the play, further highlighting the mother’s influence.
In Aristophanes play Lysistrata, the women of Greece take on the men to stop the raging war between the Athenians and the Spartans. To stop the war, the women withhold sex from their male counterparts, and take over the Acropolis for themselves. The women are indeed triumphant in their goals to stop the war, and the Athenians and Spartans come to an understanding. What is blatantly ignored, however, is that Aristophanes creates a gender war that, although seemingly rejoices the actions of the women, instead mocks the women’s power-struggle in a male dominated society, focuses on the male-privilege seen throughout the entirety of the play, and should be disregarded in the fact that this play is not even from a women’s perspective.
In the play Coriolanus, the man by with the play is named is a complicated individual. There is complexity to his personality, and subtlety to his emotions. In Act III, from III.ii.91 to 139, Coriolanus goes through an extreme shift of point of view and emotion. He has a complete reversal from not wanting compromise with the common people citizens to begrudgingly accepting that he must. For any actor trying to play Coriolanus, the importance of understanding this scene is important to understanding Coriolanus as a whole.
o’er the blood, / Or with some dram (conjur’d to this effect) / He wrought upon her.” (I iii, 101-
For centuries women have fought to obtain basic civil rights and today, they are still fighting to obtain equal rights. From the right to vote to their right to birth control, women have always been trying to assert their own independence in order to expand their freedom. While much progress has been made, there is still room for improvement. However, the evolution of women’s rights and the role of women is mirrored in literature and can be used to illustrate the progression throughout history. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is no different. Through the character Jocasta, Sophocles creates a counterpart to Oedipus and uses her to reveal the oppression of women by contrasting her and Oedipus’ relationships and reactions to the prophecy. Throughout the play Oedipus Rex, Sophocles illustrates Jocasta’s vulnerability and supportive nature in order to women as fragile, doting, and obedient wives and mothers to facilitate the necessity of self-assertion.
Women have always been disempowered due to their gender in modern and ancient times alike. In Corinth they are expected to run the household and conform to social expectations of a dutiful wife. Medea, being an immortal and descendant from the gods has a certain power in intelligence and sly cleverness. Being a foreigner, Medea’s wayward irrational behavior was expected in this play as she was not born in Greece and was seen as an exotic creature. She comes across to the audience as a powerful female character in terms of violence. Some of Medea’s reactions and choices appear to be blown out of proportion as authors generally make characters seem larger than life; this creates a better understanding of the text and the issues which are developed through the characters.
From the expansion days of Ancient Rome to the fall of the Roman Empire, women have always succumbed to living subjacent to the status of their omnipotent and dominant male figures. After leaving her childhood home and the rule of her father, a young Roman girl would then be coerced into the dominion of her husband, often taking a plethora of roles, ranging from lover, caretaker, and best friend. It is often lightheartedly stated that, “Behind every great man is an even greater woman,” and William Shakespeare exemplifies this concept beautifully in Julius Caesar, in which he effectively used the spouses of the two main characters to add more depth, drama, and literary elements to the play, bringing it to life. Although the only two female characters in Julius Caesar, Portia and Calpurnia do not play a pivotal role in the overall plot of the story, their presence is vital in illuminating and developing the characters of their husbands, Brutus and Caesar. What they reveal about their husbands leads the reader to infer that Portia is the more admirable and redeeming character.