COLLOQUIUM: Suzanne Lye, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "To Starve and To Curse: A Woman’s Anger in Ancient Greek Literature and Magic"

Thursday, November 21, 2019 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm

402 Cohen Hall 

This paper investigates two strategies that female figures in ancient Greek texts use to express anger and retaliate against those who have personally injured them: deprivation and magic. Both of these strategies base their efficacy in enacting harm to bodies in response to acute emotional distress. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for example, the goddess Demeter refuses to let the grain grow in protest for her daughter’s kidnapping, which in turn creates a crisis of hunger in both mortal and immortal societies. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, Phaedra avenges unrequited love for her stepson through an escalation of attacks on her own body, which ultimately leads to his demise. Phaedra responds to the shame she feels by committing suicide, and before that to the depression brought forth by unrequited love through starvation. In multiple versions of her myth, Medea’s anger at her treatment by the men around her causes her to lash out, whether against Jason in Euripides’ Medea through the murder of her children or against her father in Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica through the dismemberment of her brother. In a real-world example from the Greek Magical Papyri, a woman named Artemisie commissions a lead curse tablet against the father of her daughter, appealing to the supernatural to punish him for not giving their child a proper burial (PGM XL). In these and other cases, women refuse to accept the decisions and roles meted out by the men who have legal authority over them. Although they initially act within traditional boundaries, they eventually find that they must resort to employing incursions against vulnerable bodies – their own and others – often through the manipulation of supernatural forces. Whether through direct or indirect attack, women in our ancient Greek sources use their anger to fuel action, to assert themselves as individuals, and to reset the boundaries that constrain them.