Gesture, Metaphor and the Body in Trojan Women

Abstract:This paper evaluates the centrality of the body in Euripides' Trojan Women, arguing that physical and metaphorical movement is a constituent element of the dramatic narrative. My analysis seeks to promote the convergence between the "page" and the "stage" by demonstrating the close interrelation between visual and verbal meaning, and how embodied experience decidedly shapes both the language and performance of this tragedy. In particular, I indicate how the tragic playwright relies on embodied gesture and metaphor to illuminate important themes and motifs in the drama, most notably the concept of metabolê (change), the overturn of fortune, and the transition from freedom to enslavement. I ultimately aim to suggest that the play's thematic unity is also established and relayed though the materiality of the lived body. By means of its remarkable emphasis on kinetic actions and expressions, Trojan Women makes its somatic meaning felt, as the spectator (like the modern reader) is invited to evaluate tragic (un)moving bodies through the corporeal imagination of the script.