Dr Kate Cook Talk Summary, “Infanticides, Courtesans, or Noble Self-Sacrifices: What place for women in the classics and their reception?”
To celebrate International Women’s Day on Monday 8th March, the Classics Society was proud to host Durham’s own Dr Kate Cook for our last academic talk of the term. In a lecture entitled, “Infanticides, Courtesans, or Noble Self-Sacrifices: What place for women in the classics and their reception?” Dr Cook spoke to us about the similarities between the presentation of women in ancient Greek drama and the depiction of female characters in classically-inspired videogames.
Dr Cook opened the talk by reflecting on the place of feminist scholars in the classical discipline. As feminist scholarship begins to enter Classics, the question arises as to what exactly there is for these progressive academics in a field which can often feel very “traditional”. A scarcity of classical female authors raises the issue of how exactly classicists can locate women in antiquity. While many feminist scholars have approached this issue by studying the female characters within ancient texts (not just those written by women), others have turned to the area of Classical Reception as a platform for thinking about women and antiquity. It is in this area of Reception Studies that one seems to find many positive models of women in the ancient world. Reception does not, however, guarantee a positive or feminist attitude towards ancient women. In this lecture, Dr Cook addressed a particular example of classical reception which imparts a problematic portrayal of classical women: the presentation of female characters in classically-themed videogames.
Dr Cook related to us how she had recently come to notice a concerning feature of videogames inspired by the classical world: worrying similarities between the women depicted in these games and the representation of women found in ancient Greek tragedies. Although some leading feminist scholars have looked to tragedy as a platform for engaging with women in the ancient world on the basis of its myriad female characters, the abundance of women represented in these plays does not necessarily render the works feminist. While women are given more attention in tragedy than elsewhere in ancient literature, their dramatic roles offer a negative, rather than a positive, portrayal of femininity. One such stock role is that of the “dangerous woman” — excessively and intimately violent female characters such as kin-slayers and infanticides. It is these dangerous women — Medea, Clytemnestra, and Electra, amongst others — whom people tend to consider when thinking about females in Greek tragedy. Moreover, these dangerous women are often portrayed in positive manner, frequently being employed to support social causes, and rendered as figureheads of various women’s rights movements. Medea, for example, was popular amongst the Actresses’ Franchise League, an organisation associated with the suffragettes, while Yukio Ninagawa, who produced a Medea in Japan in the late 20th Century, declares that he did so in order to show women that they can be, “as strong,” and “as straightforward” as the protagonist herself. In this understanding of tragedy, these dangerous women become empowered through their violence — a blatantly problematic way of understanding femininity in the ancient world.
Alternative roles for women in Greek tragedy are not necessarily any more positive. The mother-figure, represented within a ‘reunion’ narrative in which parent and child are returned to one another, finds agency only in terms of her son’s identity. While the reunions with their children tend to be positive for these women, their consequences are generally focused on the son in a way which goes beyond the familial restoration. This is seen, for example, in Euripides’ Ion, in which the meeting with the mother allows the son to reclaim his identity as king of Athens. Creusa, Ion’s mother, is confined to a role of facilitator, while the play’s ultimate resolution is located in her son’s social reintegration. Moreover, many of these mothers are also involved in actions associated with the dangerous female characters, such as the accidental infanticide of Hypsipyle, who leaves Opheltes, son of King Lycurgus, to be killed by a snake. A second alternative role for women in tragedy is that of the self-sacrificer. In the plays of Euripides, this manifestation of femininity is commended through the playwright’s application of the word, ‘gennaios’ to describe these women. Elsewhere in Euripides’ works, the adjective, denoting one who is noble of birth and who lives up to that nobility, is used only for male characters (with the exception of Thetis, whose divinity outweighs her gender). While many men are described as ‘gennaios’ for various diverse reasons, the only way for this adjective to appear in regards to a women is within the context of self-sacrifice: Alcestis, Polyxena, Iphigenia, Evadne, and the daughters of Heracles are all called by this term. This restriction of ‘gennaios’ to women who sacrifice themselves implies that the female life may only be noble through the passive act of “being lost”, as opposed to the male life which can be ennobled through active endeavour. Hence, the roles into which tragic women are fitted are neither feminist nor productive of a feminist reception of ancient womanhood.
In truth, Dr Cook noted, it would be unreasonable to expect anything else of ancient authors — their social circumstances would not have supported a feminist picture of tragic women. The problem — that is to say, the current, modern-day problem — lies not then in these antique plays, but rather in how the women in them are thought about as representations of ancient femininity. The portrayal of women in classically-inspired videogames is one example of this problematic referral to Greek Tragedy in the reconstruction of ancient femininity. A number of issues have arisen regarding the portrayal of women in these games, the most basic being an initial dearth of female characters within the storylines, and the subsequent pushback to the increasing inclusion of women roles. Another problematic trend in the approach of these games to women is their tendency to depict female characters as prostitutes. The classically-based edition of the simulation game ‘Choices’, for example, is entitled ‘A Courtesan of Rome’ and presents a lead character who is just that, with the suggestion that she is depicted in this role in order that she might thereby participate in the social and political events of the storyline. This game therefore espouses the common misconception that women of the ancient world could only engage in historically-important affairs within the position of courtesan — an assumption argued against by scholar Rebecca Futo Kennedy — and reinforces an association of classical women with prostitution. Similarly, Hetaerae are prominent in ‘Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’, set against a 5th century BC Hellenic backdrop, while in the ‘Discovery’ series (an additional feature of the game designed to educate the reader on the culture and history behind the classically-inspired storyline) a description of prostitutes makes up one-sixth of the information on ancient women.
While the presentation of ancient women as courtesans is not directly related to Greek tragedy — indeed it is rare to find a woman portrayed as a prostitute in these plays — some further troubling features of these videogames are more directly reminiscent of Athenian drama. Two of the central female characters in ‘Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’ — Myrrine and Aspasia — recall some stock roles for women in ancient tragedy. Myrrine, for whom the player spends most of the game looking, fits into the role of ‘reunited parent’ that in taken up by characters such as Tyro and Hypsipyle in ancient drama. Moreover, like with these ancient portrayals of mothers, the reunion with Myrrine facilitates the player to return home, and thereby allows a reintegration into society similar to that experienced by tragic sons. Hence, as in tragedy, this depiction of an ancient woman redirects the focus of her actions towards the life of her male (or quasi-male, as the storyline is not altered if a player chooses to play as a female character) child. Another problematic portrait of ancient femininity exists in game’s presentation of the historical figure Aspasia. While Aspasia is not depicted as a prostitute, and although she possesses much information which assists the player in their mission, her agency in the game is accompanied by a sinister agenda which recalls the violent schemes of those “dangerous women” in Greek tragedy. This maleficent nature manifests itself in her positions as a cult leader and as an infanticide. Thus, the most powerful woman in the game assumes a role similar to that of the powerful yet dangerous woman of Athenian drama.
An indication that the developers of ‘Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey’ had Greek tragedy on the mind when conceiving their portrayals of ancient femininity is indicated by the fact that, in the Discovery tour, the figure of Medea is twice employed as a useful lesson for understanding the ancient world, and the entire story of Jason and Medea is given in a section describing the lives of Greek women. This undue emphasis on the figure of Medea in a section intended to educate players on real women’s lives indicates that the game’s developers associated ancient femininity with the tragic figure of Medea; and it is this association — between literary constructs created by male writers for the enjoyment of male audiences and historical ancient women — which is so problematic in the depiction of female characters in modern videogames.
Dr Cook concluded the talk by returning to the question of what place there is for feminist scholars within the classical tradition. Feminist classicists need to think about more than the representation of women in ancient texts — numbers, Dr Cook argued, are not enough — and instead consider where the ideas on femininity conveyed in these works are coming from. In the area of reception, scholarship must think critically about the classical myths which are making their way into modern representations of ancient women: to question who their original audiences were and to assess how appropriate their application is to modern media — is Medea creeping into places she really shouldn’t be? It is by asking questions like these that feminist scholarship can progress in the discipline of classics.
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