Book contents
3 - Womanhood, Rhetoric, and Performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2009
Summary
A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is nonetheless something that must be enacted and portrayed, something that must be realized.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday LifeThe plot of the Achilleid as we have it describes an arc bounded by Thetis' two failures: her attempt to destroy Paris' fleet, and her attempt to keep her son hidden on Scyros. Accordingly, Statius depicts Thetis as overreaching her powers; the goddess becomes by turns a figure of pathos and of comic ineptitude. The most important manifestation of her haplessness is her frequent misuse of language and rhetorical tropes; and one way of reading this incompetence is that she is trying to usurp modes of behavior inappropriate to her gender. Thetis is the mirror image of Achilles; both have equal difficulty wearing with ease the constricting garb of womanhood. In particular, Thetis' behavior is strangely at odds with what is usual for epic goddesses, and she has difficulty adapting herself to the literary models she tries to evoke, such as the traditional epic roles of protective mother and of avenging nemesis. We begin with Thetis' attempt to recreate the wrath of the Virgilian Juno.
Stormy Weather
The Achilleid begins in medias res, and we discover Thetis in mid-ocean as she observes Paris' fleet sailing back from Sparta with Helen aboard.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Transvestite AchillesGender and Genre in Statius' Achilleid, pp. 105 - 156Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005