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"Apollo Knows I Have No Children": Motherhood, Scholarship, Theater

2001; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/are.2001.0011

1080-6504

Mary‐Kay Gamel,

Irish and British Studies

In spring 1996, my students and I were in the midst of rehearsing my version of Euripides' Ion. This play is driven by an obsession with motherhood. Some fourteen or fifteen years before the play opens, Creousa, an Athenian princess, was raped by Apollo in a cave on the Acropolis. She bore a child secretly and abandoned it. Though later married, she has borne no more children. As the play begins, she and her husband arrive at Delphi to consult Apollo's oracle. Encountering a sympathetic young slave, she tells him she has come to ask whether she will ever have children. To his question, "You've never given birth? You're barren?" she answers evasively, "The Bright One knows my childlessness." Many plot twists follow: the oracle leads Creousa's husband Xuthus to believe the temple slave is his own son, and he plans to adopt the boy without telling his wife; Creousa tries to kill the boy, now called Ion, and finally learns that he is the very child she lost long ago. At one rehearsal, we were working the scene in which the chorus decides to tell Creousa her husband's secret plans, even though he has threatened them with death if they betray him (759-63): 1 Creousa: I know there's something wrong. You've got to tell me. Chorus: I will, even if I have to die twice over. You're never going to have a baby. Never hold your own child in your arms. [End Page 153] Creousa breaks into a tragic lament (789-91): No no no no To me he gave A childless life Made my house a grave. At this point Kristin, who was playing a member of the chorus, asked: "Is Creousa's fixation on motherhood typical of ancient Greek women? How do we want the audience to feel about this need of hers? How do you feel about it?" Questions like these raise significant issues about the meaning of ancient texts in later contexts. Classical scholars tend to regard ancient dramatic scripts as literary texts, and often try to reconstruct their meanings in the original context with little attention to the form in which their original audiences experienced them. Some scholars explicitly dismiss performance (see Goldhill 1986.265-86 and Taplin's response, 1995). Others assume that the language of the text is far more important than any other element. In the case of Ion, for example, Zeitlin argues that an ekphrasis narrated by a messenger (1132-65) possesses symbolic value that places it "at a higher level of representation than the dramatic actions of the play . . . on a different plane of coded, even oracular, signification" (1996.317), without considering how this speech might have been staged. Loraux insists: "No text should be disengaged from its surroundings" (1993.233), but she thinks of those surroundings not as the architecture of the theater but as "non-Euclidean space composed of superpositions rather than extension" (1993.235). And personal responses to the issues raised by Athenian drama are rare. Loraux says: "There is no statement about Athens, even when cloaked in the terms of scientific neutrality, that does not nourish very contemporary passions" (1993.250), but the reader must look hard to discern the passions being nourished beneath her cloak. Actually staging an ancient play in the late twentieth century is a very different process from analyzing its meaning and effect in the context of its first production. Yet many contemporary productions try to recreate the "original," complete with "authentic" sets and costumes. Such attempts often resemble Peter Brook's description of Deadly Theatre--performances that succeed "not despite but because of dullness. After all, one associates culture with a certain sense of duty, historical costumes and long speeches with the sensation of being bored: so, conversely, just the right degree of [End Page 154] boringness is a reassuring guarantee of a worthwhile event" (Brook 1983.11). Jonathan Miller has described the dangers...