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But the question is not how accurately tragedies reflect the behavior of real women but how truly they express society’s anxieties about relationships between men and women. In Medea, the eponymous heroine slaughters her children to take revenge on her husband (the hero Jason) when he abandons her to marry another woman. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Clytemnestra takes a lover when her husband sails for Troy; she assumes state power and murders him when he returns. In Sophocles’ Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter goads her brother Orestes into revenging their father’s death by murdering their mother Clytemnestra and Antigone is the story of a woman who defies her uncle King Creon to bury her brother when he has banned it. Creon orders Antigone to be buried alive in a tomb. Although Creon has a change of heart and tries to release Antigone, he finds she has hanged herself. Creon's son Haemon, who was in love with Antigone commits suicide with a knife, and his mother Queen Eurydice, also kills herself in despair over her son's death. Euripides’s The Bacchae tells how women worshippers of the orgiastic wine god Dionysus are transformed into Amazons. They rampage around the countryside, sack villages for plunder, defeat a contingent of soldiers in battle, and in an ecstatic frenzy tear King Pentheus limb from limb when he tries to see what they are doing.
The ‘tragedy’ in each case results when women defy the patriarchal order, breaking free from the confinement that imposes them. Often, the women do so while displaying traditionally male heroic qualities such as courage, strength, cunning, desire for revenge, and pride to name a few. Their rebellion is often in the name of the family or ‘household’, which predates and supersedes the demands of the state. Creon, when Antigone affirms that her love for her brother obliges her to bury him decently in defiance of the law, asserts “We’ll have no woman’s law here while I live.”
In rebellion, the tragic heroines cross the aforementioned social boundary between what is acceptable ‘female’ behavior and what is not and thus become masculine. As Antigone challenges the law, Ismene warns her sister “We were born women…we were not meant to fight with men.” While the playwrights often convey sympathy with women for the suffering and the oppression that spurs them into rebellion, the resulting violence and savagery reinforce the underlying anxiety that women are wild and irrational creatures, “eruptions of nature who are a threat to the civilized order created by men.” (Jack Holland) This expresses itself in one of the most powerful pieces of misogyny: In Euripides’ Hippolyta, Hippolytus declaims: “Go to hell! I’ll never have my fill of hating Women, not if I’m said to talk without ceasing, for women are also unceasingly wicked. Either someone should teach
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