#beginning to strongly dislike that tag also ive used it very inconsistently

[finelythreadedsky]

would you mind expanding on how gender is about death to the ancient greeks? i don’t really understand what that means, (but im curious to learn!)

Okay so the first thing you need to understand is that sometimes I just say things that make sense in my head and within the specific context of every piece of writing and media I have ever consumed and only those. So not sure how much explaining I can really do, but I think there’s relevant stuff in my tag death and the maiden (which is not just for that trope).

First of all it’s a big persephone mood, because she’s conceptualized both as an archetype of marriage and entry into womanhood and of death (and rebirth). When Louise Gluck said “spring will return, a dream/ based on a falsehood: that the dead return” she’s picking up on the story’s equation of the return of the dead with the return of a girl to her mother from her husband— equally impossible. I’ve talked a little about that connection here.

But I think it comes down to the fact that for the greeks, womanhood was defined as the ability to give birth/create life which is intrinsically wrapped up in death??? I’ve been having some pretty incoherent thoughts about greek perspectives on dualisms and opposites and then ancient ideas of womanhood as related to life but also therefore inherently related to death... cyclical dualisms... not sure how much sense that makes. (and then dualism itself is also gendered female as opposed to male singularity, so the life/death relationship is also inherently female…)

Actually I think it makes some sense in the terms I put it in a while ago to talk about hadestown— women are conceptualized (in hadestown and generally in greek thought) as cyclical and ~natural~ and connected to the cycles of the earth, i.e. to the cycles of life and death. I read an article for my greek paper that talks about the greek opposition of woman-as-nature and man-as-culture/civilization, and I think this is similar. linearity and stability are gendered male, and cyclicality and change are gendered female, which makes sense in terms of what life would have been supposed to look like: a man’s identity and status remain constant throughout his life, but a woman moves through daughter/wife/mother as her identity and function in society, as opposed to how having a wife or children has little bearing on a man’s identity.

And then also the conceptualization of love as death and death as love… there’s a HUGE motif in greek (and roman) literature/art of the conflation of marriage (or sex or love) and death (that’s a lot of the stuff in my death and the maiden tag). (only for women, though, bc obviously love and marriage and sex are for girls.) and I think I’m running with that to the idea of womanhood as a kind of death for a girl. A while ago I phrased it as “marriage is when a girl turns into a woman and death is when a girl turns into a body and those are the same thing” because for the ancient greeks a woman is a body, a body defined by its ability to create life but also not really alive in the way that men are, i.e. a participant in life.

And then also I am literally always thinking about philomela (recently because of how she’s alluded to in the Agamemnon) and the idea of the female voice as essentially a voice of lament, and then there’s the actual role of women in mourning and death rituals. I’ve read some things that talk about mourning and funerals as one of the only means of public expression available to athenian women. and then woman defined as weaver (my jam), weaving defined as shroud-weaving… woman defined as one who laments and remembers the dead…

but also like. think of all of this as said with the voice of someone very stoned, very late at night. “gender... is about death...” yeah sure anything goes