Women
in the Oikos: The Stranger Within
by Catherine Colegrove,
Canterbury School, Ft. Wayne, IN
Unlike the modern Western model
of courtship and marriage, the circumstances in 5th century BCE
Greece which resulted in a couple's union involved little prior
association of the bride- and groom-to-be. Marriage arrangements
were negotiated between the bride's male guardian and the groom
and amounted to an alliance between two oikoi, with money and/or goods being exchanged
as a surety. So a man, in effect, when he received his bride
into his house, was allowing a stranger to enter, a stranger
whose motives and loyalties he might well have cause to doubt.
After all, why should a girl of fourteen or so immediately transfer
her love and loyalty to a man twice her age whom she may never
have met before? Like many of you, I teach high school, so we
know about those fourteen year-old girls. Therefore, it is not
without reason that the betrayed husband in the speech
of Lysias says that when he first married he "kept a
watch on [his wife] so far as was possible, with such observation
of her as was reasonable.1
In the plays of Aristophanes,
especially in the "women's" plays, the Lysistrata,
the Ecclesiazusae and the Thesmophoriazusae, the
male anxiety that results from having taken such a stranger into
one's house seems to run rampant. Male characters in these works
make many accusations against their wives' fidelity, sexual and
otherwise, and the female characters complain about how their
husbands' suspicions have ruined their lives. This hypersensitivity
and exaggeration on the part of the men is, of course, a typical
feature of comedy. Aristophanes' works here are fulfilling one
of their primary social functions: the plays reduce the anxiety
about this issue by allowing the audience to laugh at it.
But what, specifically, are
these men worried that their wives will do? The suspicions of
the Aristophanic characters seem to center on the belief that
the women are stealing from the household and that they are compromising
the legitimacy of the children by engaging in adultery and by
passing off exchanged/foundling babies as their own. These activities
strike directly at the stability of the oikos and its
ability to survive in a society which was composed of competing
households. I will now examine how these suspicions played out
on the stage and how they fit into the general scheme of Greek
male anxiety about women.
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