Date of Award

Spring 2025

Document Type

M.A. Essay

First Advisor

Roberta Stewart

Second Advisor

Margaretha Kramer

Abstract

This paper explores how ancient Greek literature and culture construct autonomous, mobile women as threats to the ideological and spatial order of the polis. Referencing mythological precedents and closely reading Classical texts, I propose the category of “excepted women” to address the threads of female transgression woven throughout this extensive literary corpus. Focusing on figures who transgress imposed spatial boundaries, I examine how such women are positioned as disruptors of gendered norms and civic stability, thus reflecting deep cultural anxieties about female agency and movement into spaces coded as masculine. The paper engages theoretical frameworks from Althusser and Butler to analyze how these women are figured in particular texts; operating with the dual levels of interpellation inherent to a state-sponsored, publicly-staged drama, the 5th century plays Agamemnon (Aeschylus) and Ecclesiazusae (Aristophanes) are examined closely and seen to clearly depict the female rearticulation of ideological norms through spatial transgression. In this analysis, the excepted woman becomes a figure through which Greek culture negotiates the limits of gendered space and power—she is always seen to have the potential to unsettle or exceed these boundaries. In tracing the movement of the excepted woman, this paper illuminates the cultural and conceptual mechanisms by which femininity was policed, performed, and persistently imagined as a site of instability in ancient Greece.

Original Citation

McGrath, Anne, "Beware the Wandering Woman: Depictions of Female Spatial Transgression in Athenian Public Dramas of the 5th and 4th Centuries BCE" (2025). Comparative Literature M.A. Essays.

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