On Violence Against Trojan Women

This paper deploys Jacqueline Rose’s On Violence and On Violence Against Women (2021) to re-evaluate Seneca’s tragedy Troades. Rose’s framework for thinking about “unthinkable” violence is usefully robust, engaging in feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-colonial theoretical methods as she addresses the intersection of violence against women and racializing violence from the paterfamilias up to and through the ongoing pandemic.

Troades opens with a misdirection: concern for violence against the male body by males in terms that recall violence against women (cf. Tro. 41-56 on the slaying of Priam ad aras with the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Aesch. Ag. 228ff., a scene which haunts the Troades throughout). Hecuba, however, recognizes and redirects attention to the impending, widespread violence against the still-living Trojan women (agnosco Troada turbam, 96) in terms that signal women’s identity in the Senecan tragedic corpus (cf. Herc. Fur. 1015-17; Med. 1021). The relationship between the self and the destruction of the body in Troades has been treated as a philosophical question dramatized (and thus problematized) by Busch (2009). But this paper argues that the “crimes of identity” (Spivak 2015), both individual and collective, both threatened and enacted throughout the tragedy, are complicated by the gendered and racializing violence inherent in the drama that explicitly represents a conflict between Europe and Asia (Tro. 896). The grooming of Polyxena for her sacrificial “marriage” to Achilles by Helen (Tro. 861-926), the discussion among the female principals of Polyxena’s distressed state alongside the anticipation of Andromache’s enslavement to a dominus (Tro. 975), and the dragging off of Polyxena narrated by her mother (Tro. 1008) all demand that we reformulate our understanding of the violence perpetrated against Asian, female bodies by Greek males as simultaneously gendered and racializing.

Rose’s caution that we not reproduce the gaze of the voyeur when thinking about violence against women calls our attention to the position and perspective of both Roman male authorship and audience in relation to this Roman Troades. Whereas the Euripidean Troades (along with the Hecuba and Andromache) asked the Athenian audience to consider the consequences of warfare upon the women of their legendary enemies, morally complicating the position of the Greek victor, the identification of the Roman male spectator to characters in the Senecan Troades is significantly more fraught. Seneca signals the proto-Roman-ness of these Trojans early on in his text (compare Tro. 141 with Verg. Aen. 557-8), moving his audience closer to the Trojan women and their concerns. On the other hand, the Romans’ own wars of imperial expansion and growing imperium position both author and audience more closely with the victorious and violent Greeks, especially as Seneca flags sites involved in Roman imperial victory and incorporation into the Roman provinces (Tro. 1104ff.). This paper closes by probing the limits of identification through and with violence from the imperial center.