[The Montana Professor 16.1, Fall 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Barbara Goff
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004
413 pp., $60.00 hc
Linda Gillison
Modern and Classical Languages
UM-Missoula
Linda.gillison@umontana.edu
The title of Goff's book is striking and dense: striking in its association of citizenship and its civil rights and responsibilities with the wild women of Euripides' drama; dense in its description of content and focus, the ritual practice of women in ancient Greece. Every term in the title receives from Goff careful and clear explication. The result is an orderly treatment of the multitudinous activities which women performed in Greece from the archaic period into the Hellenistic period in an effort to contact the divine on behalf of themselves or their community. Goff is in command of a broad range of diverse sources (literary, epigraphical, papyrological, cross-cultural, and theoretical) and is thus able to propose a new and promising understanding of the citizen life of a woman in ancient Greece. Her aim is to identify a "material presence" of the city woman of ancient Greece--traces of her active presence in the public spaces and under the gaze of her city.
The polemical force of Goff's title derives not only from the contrast between the city and the extra-urban area with which we often associate Bacchic activity, between some orderly kind of civic behavior and the disorder of a worshiping Bacchant, but also between the idea of citizenship and the governing paradigm within which classical scholars generally situate women of ancient Greece: a paradigm of seclusion within their houses and exclusion from what we today would consider civic rights and duties. Goff's study delineates the space which ritual constructed for the Greek woman outside the confines of her house and, thus, inside the public life of the polis which lived its meaningful civic life in the open air. She does not, however, depict the ritual sphere as one which "liberated" the woman in a way which might seem appropriate to modern feminists. Instead, she traces a much more complex relationship among the woman, the society, and the ritual. I will return to this relationship later. Suffice it here to say, in advance, that Goff sees the ritual sphere as a place in which "woman" is constructed as a subject participating in the public life of the community but only in a mode which will advance the patriarchal culture of which the community is a part.
Even Goff's use of the term "citizen" in reference to a female is a surprise. Although Sophocles and Euripides employed the term politis as Elektra's form of address to her "fellow citizen-women," it is extremely rare in written sources until the mature Hellenistic period (3rd century BCE) and not common even then. Most examples come from papyri, a collection which notoriously presents evidence indicative of either a dramatic change in the status of women and the options they enjoyed or another whole world (geographically, economically, generically) of female lives from that suggested by the mainstream literary sources of the classical period. The phrase "citizen Bacchae" (politides Bakchai) Goff takes from the epitaph of a Milesian woman of the 3rd or 2nd century BCE in which the stone urges the "Bacchae of the city" to greet the deceased Alkmeonis, a Dionysiac priestess in life, who had led them to the hills for the worship of their deity.
Ideological work is the effort which a community devotes to constituting itself according to its prevailing values, and Goff situates ritual action squarely within the area of the hard ideological work undertaken by ancient Greek societies. Like most ideological work, ritual is, in Goff's view, directed toward the human members of the society, though the gods are also involved in the sanctions imposed by ideological ritual. It is generally accepted that a society will be rich in rituals surrounding its critical communal experiences--birth and death, for instance, or maturation and initiation--and Goff does focus on the well-known rituals of female initiation like the Arkteia of Brauron and the Athenian Arrephoria as well as the choral dances represented by the choral verse of Alkman. But she also considers the rituals in which gynaikes--married wives and mothers, already well over the threshold into the life of the mature community--were involved such as the Thesmophoria and the activities of the Sixteen at Elis, where gynaikes not only oversaw races for the parthenoi (marriageable young girls) of the community but also performed their own annual rituals. Unlike the parethenos, who performs the appropriate ritual once, makes a successful transition, and does not revisit the rite, the gyne will repeat the rite which is entrusted to her annually until death or infirmity or possibly some age limit removes her from the group of ritually active wives and mothers. At this juncture, Goff sees ritual hard at its ideological work: in order to insure the "intimate cooperation"--crucial to the continuing existence of the community--of wives and mothers, the civic ideology enjoined not a single but an annually repeated action. It is as if, in the case of the gyne, the community never quite saw its work of control and construction as completed.
In order to accept Goff's thesis that ritual action created a certain citizenship for the Greek female ritual practitioner, the reader must forego modern ideas of citizenship and begin to understand how the Greeks, variously but with some consistency, perceived of it. Abundant scholarly work on "civic ideology" has now shown that Greek women were considered and considered themselves as participating members of their state rather than as rank outsiders. The verb metechein (to participate in or have a part of) was regularly used to describe many kinds of civic activities and many ways of being in a community beyond voting and holding of public office. Women most certainly were active in some of those crucial activities. Goff's study focuses on a particular area of women's "public" activity and participation in civic life. She perceives the Greek woman as a participant in the welfare of the entire state in a way which both brings women "outside" into the public gaze and encourages them in their roles as successful wives and mothers of the community.
"Ritual polyvalence" is a phrase crucial to Goff's theory of ritual action as constructing women participants in the community in ways valuable for both males and females of the group. A "polyvalent" ritual has different significance for different individuals and groups involved and may even serve one individual (or group) in more than one direction simultaneously. Thus, a ritual can give a woman a space and time to participate actively and in a way which honors her as subject but which simultaneously constructs her in a manner apt to further the interests and welfare of the community. At the same time, the ritual may emphasize, inculcate, and reward the very behaviors which represent her constraint in the community--weaving, marriage, childbearing, fertility perhaps. In this way, the woman receives a satisfaction and honor which allows her to fashion herself as a subject within the community's life and endeavors while by rewarding her for societally approved activity the male power structure of the community situates her subjectivity precisely in the areas where it finds it most useful and even crucial.
Goff's analysis of women's ritual activity reveals how often the tasks assigned to females in the ritual sphere replicate and reinforce the roles which are required of them in life. Goff sees the girl-choruses represented most vividly in Alkman's verse as groupings intended to socialize the young girl, as she approaches marriageable age, into the role of "observed" or "seen," into a discernment between appropriate and inappropriate public gaze, and into the idea of herself as an object of erotic interest--an idea which will make her more successful and contented as a wife, her inevitable destiny. Here, as always, Goff avoids the facile concept of the woman as mere commodity of commerce to be traded off on the initiative of men: the sources do, of course, give us to believe that such decisions were made by men--fathers, older brothers, uncles--without much consultation of the girl or her mother. Surely the situation was more complex than that, though it is difficult for us to ascertain nuance on the basis of the typical male-crafted sources. Goff sanely considers that the society would have tried in some way to educate its young women into the role of desirable woman and of potential and then actual wife--to engineer their "intimate cooperation" in its welfare.
A representative example of Goff's procedure is her treatment of the Athenian Arrephoria, a ritual involving young girls--children, really, but children in a society where a girl's "childhood" might end with marriage at age 13 or 14--who leave their year-long temporary residence near the temple of Athena Polias, where they have lived with the priestess and assisted in the weaving of the new peplos for the goddess, and, in imitation of the mythical daughters of the mythical king Kekrops, carry something the nature of which they do not know deep into an underground cavern where they deposit it on the ground before returning with another closely covered something. We are quite ignorant of the meaning of this ritual action; as so often, the men who observed parts of it and knew the general outlines of expectations and wrote about the ritual may not any longer have had an idea of its culturally intended goal, much less what it meant to the young participants or what their female precursors in the rite told them or implied as to its real meaning for them as women. Goff considers what we do know of the ritual in light of what we do know of the societal expectations for a young Greek woman, and makes some sense of the rite as it may have been presented to the children by their adult female mentors and understood by them as actors.
Certainly, their assistance in the weaving of the peplos destined for Athena at year's end trained the arrephoroi in the activity which is a virtual signifier for the female in Greek antiquity--weaving--while bringing honor upon their (aristocratic) families. In addition, though, Goff (99) sees the descent/return ritual of the Arrephoria as participating in a "dialectic of display and concealment" intended both to frighten and to excite the young girls, thus preparing them for an adult sexuality which would at first be equally rife with terror and excitement. They have, after all, been selected with a particular mysterious telos in view, taken away from their families for the year, and then revealed (at least psychically) to the community as they carry out the descent-with-something into the darkness, the leaving-of-something on the earth, and the returning-with-something equally hidden and mysterious.
The Arrephoria was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a few chosen girls of Athens; the participants in Alkmanic girl-choruses would only have participated for a few years as they moved toward the threshold of maturity and marriage. The Thesmophoria, on the other hand, pulled select matrons together annually to work in a woman-appropriate way for the community's welfare. The liminal areas of life--birth, death--were the purview of women, and in this rite the "city of women" absented itself physically and publicly from the oikos in order to intercede for the year's agricultural fertility. In this ritual, apparently the most widespread in all of Greece, the woman's typical relationship with the frightening divine powers of fertility was set to benefit the entire community directly. Now, so much is generally (thought to be) understood. Goff, however, interprets the attendant sexual abstinence, the risqué jokes, the handling of piglets and models of male genitalia not only as elements in the agricultural work of the ritual but also as moments in which the wife and mother could represent herself to herself and to her friends in a "safe" ritual space as an erotic subject. The ritual, according to this interpretation, enacts for the matron the sexual possibilities--the potentials of desire--which must be acknowledged for successful marriage but which also must be controlled and kept within the authorized limits of both the ritual and the legal marriage. Thus, according to Goff's reading, the Thesmophoria--annually repeated by all legal wives of citizens--enacted female eroticism while encoding the constraint which society demanded of the female.
To quote Goff (202), "the ritual sphere imagines solutions for the contradictions produced by patriarchal culture, but also restages those contradictions in its own terms." The ritual world, then, is a publicly constructed world in which alternatives can be canvassed and tried on always within the framework of continuing public expectations and always within the subjectivity of an individual constrained by a dominant set of values.
Goff devotes a great deal of care to two of the "best known" groups of women in the Greek world: the Pythias and the Bacchae. In each case she illustrates and supports her thesis that Greek society did make space for women to participate as active, creative, self-conscious subjects at important junctures in community life. Again, her control of non-literary, non-mainstream sources and cross-cultural theory combine with her analytical skill and subtlety to produce surprising pictures: of the Pythia as a bright, focused, well-trained, rational woman whose position at the omphalos of the world prepared her to answer all manner of questions, personal or political, posed to her; and of the Bacchant as a woman whose "possession" by the god did not render her a helpless and witless victim of the deity but, rather, offered an opportunity for satisfying creativity which could benefit not only the worshiper but also her city.
The final chapter, a survey of Greek tragic and comic drama as it pertains to her subject, is a disappointment. Though Goff does have interesting contributions to make, one senses that she is hurrying to finish or somehow less committed to this more commonly studied material. Here, she identifies a development in tragedy's depiction of women's ritual life through the fifth century, when Athens moved through some decades of confident if contested and sometimes problematic advance and then the disastrous late years of the Peloponnesian War, as Athenian dramatists sought ways to talk about or reflect the challenges and sometimes weaknesses and failures of their state. The assertion that discourse about matters social and political in Greek literature was often framed in terms of gender tension and conflict is by no means new, but Goff focuses in a particularly useful way on the matter of women's effectiveness as ritual practitioners and representatives of the polis within tragic drama. Her schema posits effective ritual practice by women as a sign of the healthy polis and, conversely, interrupted or corrupted ritual practice as a sign of problems within the polis. It is, in Goff's schema, no surprise that so many troubled and troubling events in tragedy are situated in Thebes, whose regular hostility to Athens is well known. She dubs (8) Thebes the "anti-city" whose women are continuously, in tragedy, prevented from carrying out their ritual practice in an appropriate and effective way, thus both reflecting and effecting unhappiness within the polis. Goff's care and subtlety in analyzing women's ritual subjectivity both chronologically and within the complex inter-polis relationship of Athens, Thebes, and Argos in particular throw a new and special light on the function and context of the genre.
Even after all of Goff's excellent work, the exact nature of the citizenship-status of the woman in ancient Greece remains somehow elusive. The problem is one of distance, sources, silence, and the strangeness which must always be confronted and accepted as we try to understand a culture from the deep past--even one which has contributed so much to our own traditions. There is a gap which we can probably never bridge to a world where priestesses grew beards to warn their fellow citizens of danger. Our language may not be sufficient to describe the relationship between these women and their cities--a relationship for which Goff herself (164) even uses the term "latent citizenship" to indicate a participatory status which "could be rendered visible, in its various contours, by ritual participation."
When Goff studies the various ritual activities of which Greek women were practitioners, of course, the women's voices are still "mediated"--this time not by a male contemporary but by a female scholar, an outsider to their community and its values and an insider to her own twenty-first century society. These Greek women can simply not speak to us straightforwardly or directly. The ritual sphere participates in imaginary actions and proposes imaginary solutions which may not be lived-out in the day-to-day realm. Goff's work, though, has added an important dimension to the world in which we can situate the silent women of Greek history and literature.
[The Montana Professor 16.1, Fall 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]