Sacrificial Bodies and the Body of the Text in Aristophanes' Lysistrata

Abstract

‘Why is inert Matter female and the animating Nous male, please?’‘Because earth is the Mother, because all beautiful things spring from her, trees and flowers and creatures.’A.S. Byatt Angels and InsectsByart's characters, the Victorian gentlewoman who asks the question and the poet who answers, articulate an enduring notion of Western popular and intellectual culture. The association of women with matter and the body, men with form and the soul, is the legacy of ancient Greek thought which gendered the physical universe according to social convention: women were considered to be passive and therefore acted upon by the formative male principle. Examples of this bilateral symmetry include preformation theories of conception which suggest that a mother only provides the fetus with its raw material, while the father's seed organises that undeveloped material into its human form. This is a value-laden distinction, as we see from ancient philosophy which privileges the masculine soul over the feminine body and aligns men with the intellect but women with the baser corporeal passions.