Readers of Weiberg’s book will be familiar with the increasing use of the term “trauma” in popular culture, literary studies, and psychological treatment. From its inception in the work of Charcot and Freud, the concept has now permeated the popular sphere as a way to conceptualize psychological and emotional responses to disturbing events. In Classical literature, ‘trauma’ has generally been used to characterize the fragmentation of language and narration which follows the violent disruption of characters’ lives. The typical trauma survivor has experienced something that breaks in upon their previous reality—often combat-related—and later struggles with intrusive memories. Weiberg follows and seeks to disrupt the tradition of books such as Achilles in Vietnam (Shay 1994), Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks (Meineck and Konstan 2014), and The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today (Dorries 2016), by turning the lens of trauma on female, domestic narratives. In examining four “homecoming tragedies,” which follow the nostoi of Trojan War heroes, this volume explores the generative potential of the trauma paradigm in understanding female experiences surrounding ancient war.
Weiberg opens her study of women’s trauma in homecoming tragedies with a critique of the “trauma hero” narrative, which centers the experience of the male combat trauma survivor and his triumphant return. Employing an intersectional feminist approach, Weiberg interrogates Froma Zeitlin’s famous claim that women’s suffering in tragedy is often a means to explore male subjectivity, proposing rather that certain narratives structurally center female experiences in their own right. In plays located on the home front, after war, or otherwise away from the battlefield, women’s waiting, trauma, and its varied manifestations take center stage and shape the narrative in ways which have often received structural criticisms as “monotonous,” “broken-backed,” or otherwise deviating from the idealized tragic form (106).
As foreshadowed in its title, this book undertakes a robust examination of trauma “witnessing,” which is inherent in the form of Attic tragedy. Tragedy, argues Weiberg, exhibits three levels of witnessing (drawing on Dori Laub’s distinction): on the first level of witnessing one’s self, tragic characters struggle to articulate the traumatic events they themselves experience; on the second level, the “internal audience” of the Chorus witnesses the trauma of others; on the third level, audiences of the City Dionysia and Lenaia in Athens “bear witness to the act of witnessing.”[1] To draw out the connections between these levels, Weiberg makes relevant connections between contemporary events of fifth-century Athens and the female tragic perspectives highlighted in the plays. These connections contextualize the plays in contemporary events, such as disastrous episodes of the Peloponnesian Wars, and their impact upon the lives of women and families at home.
Weiberg’s first chapter on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon analyzes Clytemnestra’s emotional state and act of vengeance through the paradigm of “moral injury,” that is, the pain of committing or witnessing actions that betray one’s idea of “what is right.” By applying this paradigm, Weiberg transforms the discussion of Clytemnestra as a “transgressive woman,” impeding her husband’s nostos, to one whose “over-justice” (hyperdikos, Aesch. Ag. 1396) is the marker of her experience of moral injury. Weiberg expands this reframing of Clytemnestra’s character to encompass a female-centric view of the play that hinges upon how characters treat the memory of the Trojan war and Iphigeneia’s sacrifice. This analysis is supported by a reading of the domineering stagecraft associated with Clytemnestra and a close reading of her hyperbolic language. The willingness to remember and the ability to be successfully heard divide along gender lines: the chorus embody a collective memory engaged in “disremembering” Iphigeneia, while Cassandra is the one character who advocates for bearing witness to past trauma.[2] Finally, the Furies embody the social position of Clytemnestra’s anger: they are rejected by the other gods, and personify rage, excess, and social isolation. Weiberg’s reading centers the play’s focus in Clytemnestra’s moral injury and agency, shifting focus from her previous representation as a transgressive woman, and instead finding that the Agamemnon, along with the rest of the Oresteia, represents perpetrator trauma as a contagious moral injury which is passed through generations.
In the second chapter, adapted from her 2016 article, Weiberg interprets Sophocles’ Women of Trachis as a play which focuses on women’s challenges in articulating trauma and finding sympathetic audiences.[3] Prior readings understand the play as a hero’s nostos foiled by Deianeira’s fatal error, which is linked with the Greek perception of her femininity. In contrast, Weiberg harnesses the feminist psychological concept of “insidious trauma,” which explains how women’s individual experiences of sexual and gender-based violence are compounded by the pervasive, cultural fear surrounding such events in patriarchal societies (69). This fear is reflected in Deianeira’s language, where Weiberg finds that insidious trauma has eroded borders between her own pain and others’: Deianeira uses the same language to describe her own pain and Heracles’ labors (ponoi) and is struck with physical and emotional pain upon realizing Iole’s analogous experience. This chapter effectively challenges both the idea of a single hamartia as well as the trauma concept of a single, originary wound: these concepts are inadequate to span the range of female experiences in patriarchal societies.
Chapter three takes up Euripides’ Heracles, as Weiberg reads the experience of Megara and Heracles’ family through the concepts of ambiguous loss and the “chronic trauma” it produces. “Ambiguous loss” results from an undefined loss which lacks closure, such as a family member missing in action, and so continually afflicts the sufferer who cannot circumscribe or articulate their own grief. Heracles’ absence, and potential death, leaves his family shut out of their house, at the altar of Zeus, at which they supplicate, and from which they cannot be moved due both to the nature of their grief and the threat of the usurping tyrant who has invaded their home. A particular focus is the play’s stagecraft, as Weiberg traces “architectural features” of ambiguous loss back to the Odyssey; Penelope is always leaning on a pillar or weeping in her bedroom. The structure of the play, Weiberg argues, is episodic in a reflection of Greek political stasis of the second half of the 5th century BC—the play emulates the sensation of living through continuous political crisis. Such crisis is also thematically present: the play questions political values of Athens as well as the “mastery” the hero has over his own life. Similar to chapter 3, this reading of Heracles interrogates how singular a traumatic wound can be, and how it can resist closure for characters surrounding the male hero.
Chapter four interprets the emotional journey and recovery of Helen and Menelaus in Euripides’ Helen through Caruth’s concept of “unclaimed experience,” the trauma survivor’s mental and emotional estrangement from their own story, which challenges their sense of identity and memory.[4] The characters of Euripides’ Helen, writes Weiberg, must navigate the “difficult condition of survival after traumatic loss in order to achieve their homecoming,” haunted by their losses and stories which challenge their sense of memory and identity (141). The “pain of surviving traumatic loss” manifests structurally in doublings, repetitions, and returns. Helen struggles with the stories about her that result from her double’s presence at Troy, Menelaus with the persistent grief for the losses at Troy. The play is thus a formal metaphor for trauma recovery and the communalization of the trauma narrative. This idea is contextualized culturally in the milieu of post-Sicilian-expedition Athens which experienced a complicated process of denying and realizing loss.[5] The solution for Helen and Menelaus’ persistent “unclaimed experience” is a sort of therapeutic reenactment which occurs in two stages: first, Menelaus recounts his war experiences upon discovering the real Helen. Menelaus’ disturbance at the deaths over the eidolon Helen is resolved by the second reenactment, the couple’s escape from Egypt by sea, which parallels the situation at Troy in its retelling by the messenger. Weiberg maintains that the play is ambiguous about the cost of trauma rehabilitation: Egyptian “others” must die in the sea-battle reenactment, and both beneficial female collaboration and Helen’s creative play with gender roles ultimately end upon her return to a patriarchal marriage structure.
In the fifth, concluding chapter, Weiberg reflects on how the project changed over the course of its execution. Far from simply “a diverse collection of emotional wounds performed by female characters in Greek plays about homecoming,”(172) the author encountered the complexity surrounding social and gender status, and varying manifestations of trauma. Weiberg offers a warning to the classicist aspiring to apply trauma theory to their texts, citing Rothberg in that “not all violence and suffering are best described by trauma” (179). To apply the term universally runs the risk of depoliticizing the concept and suggesting that it is an unchangeable aspect of the human experience.
Perhaps because of its breadth and ambition, this book encounters challenges which are endemic to the field of trauma studies, where no clear consensus has yet emerged around terminology and the relationship between different types of trauma. This blurriness of definition emerges around the author’s borrowing of “moral injury” in the first chapter, as it is used in turn, as a yardstick for the pain of trauma heroes (who alone have “their pain (elevated) to the level of ‘real’ trauma,” by previous scholarship [27]), as a component of “perpetrator trauma” (In the Oresteia, “perpetrator trauma… is represented …as a contagious moral injury’ 34), and finally is even discussed as something other than trauma (“Like trauma, moral injury is shaped by social factors…” [53]). In other scholarship, the term “moral injury” has been the subject of debate, regarding how it relates to trauma, or whether it itself is trauma.[6] Further, the movement from insidious trauma to chronic trauma between chapters 2 and 3 would have benefitted from some acknowledgement of their similarities (their compounding effects, their pervasiveness, and concurrence in certain types of narratives): more attention could have been devoted to the similar structural implications for plays depicting the two kinds of trauma.The reader is at moments left wondering about the relationship between trauma and its individual manifestations united by a single term; overall, a more clearly defined negotiation could be reached between the open definition of trauma as “a contested and unstable concept” (7) and the idea that “not all…suffering is best described by trauma.”[7]
This is a theory-rich book which harnesses numerous works on trauma studies towards a more complete understanding of the perspectives represented in Attic tragedy. As such, it is a useful introduction for the Classics scholar seeking to gain literacy in the intersection of Classic and trauma studies. Individual chapters would also prove useful reading assignments for courses addressing trauma in literature and language, as well as for tragedy courses in general. Overall, Weiberg has opened new avenues for exploring the productive intersection between trauma and tragedy, in exemplary fashion.
Notes
[1] Laub, Dori. 1995. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, 61-75. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
[2] Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2016. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[3] Weiberg, Erika. 2016. “The Writing on the Mind: Deianeira’s Trauma in Sophocles’ Trachiniae.” Phoenix 72, no. 1 (2018): 19-42.
[4] Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
[5] Thuc. 7.87.6
[6] Pederson, Joshua. 2020. “Moral Injury in Literature.” Narrative 28, no. 1 (2020): 43-61. “…literary critics, like psychologists and therapists—would benefit from treating moral injury as a category distinct from trauma” (44). Other theorists have treated ‘perpetrator pain’ using the trauma model in literature: e.g., Crownshaw, Rick. “Rereading Der Vorleser, Remembering the Perpetrator.” In Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic, edited by Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger, 147–61. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009;
Vice, Sue. 2013. “Exploring the Fictions of Perpetrator Suffering,” Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 2.1/2, pp. 15–25.1.
[7] Rotheberg, Michael. 2014. “Preface: Beyond Tancred and Clorinda—Trauma Studies for Implicated Subjects.” In The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, xi-xviii. New York: Routledge. p. xvii, cited by Weiberg p. 179.