Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy

Author Victoria Wohl offers an illuminating analysis of the exchange of women in Sophocles's TRACHINIAE, Aeschylus's AGAMEMNON, and Euripides's ALCESTIS. Wohl shows the failure of women to become active subjects. While these failures seem to validate male hegemony, the women's actions blur the distinction between male subject and female object, calling into question the very nature of the tragic self.