emma’s Reviews > Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman > Status Update

“the word most used […] to describe those hapless women, hanging with their neck in a noose, is derē. A richer word, no doubt, because it carries a much stronger affective charge. What the daughter of Oedipus, silent and abandoned, had imprisoned in the knot of her veil, auchēn, is the neck seen from the nape. Deré, on the contrary, is “the front of the neck, the throat,” a strong point of feminine beauty.

“When young girls die, or when, as we have seen, wives die, there are no words available to denote the glory of a woman that do not belong to the language of male renown.

And glory always makes the blood of women flow.”

“Their deaths are fully their own, and claimed as such: some commentators promptly classify them as suicides. In doing this they reduce the significance of the bold departure by which the sacrificial victim gains control over her own death. Does a voluntary sacrifice belong with suicide? It would be better to see in it a variant on the “fine death” that is accepted for country or for glory—“

“In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Iphigenia struggled “like a goat,” and her father committed her to death “like a beast taken from a flock.”

…

“The goat was always sacrificed at the critical moment when the battle was starting, and it was no ordinary victim.”

“Even when a woman kills herself like a man, she nevertheless dies in her bed, like a woman.”

“For women, death is an exit. Bebēke, “she is gone,” is said of a woman who dies or has killed herself.”

“A man never hangs himself, even when he has thought of doing so; a man who kills himself does it in a manly way. For a woman, however, there is an alternative. She can seek a womanly way of ending her life, by the noose, or she can steal a man’s death by seizing a sword.”

“The death of a man inevitably calls for the suicide of a woman, his wife. Why should a woman’s death counterbalance a man’s? Because of the heroic code of honor that tragedy loves to recall, the death of a man could only be that of a warrior on the battlefield […] and, on merely being told of her husband’s death, his wife, immured in her home, would kill herself.”

“Women in tragedy died violently. More precisely, it was in this violence that a woman mastered her death, a death that was not simply the end of an exemplary life as a spouse. It was a death that belonged to her totally…”

“At the level of social expectations, the city, in effect, had no comment to make on a woman’s death, even if she was as perfect as she could be. A woman was allowed no accomplishment beyond leading an exemplary existence, quietly as a wide and mother alongside a man who loved the life of a citizen.”

…

“The glory of a woman was to have no glory.”