Fantasies of return in Greek tragedy and culture

This dissertation examines the fantasy of the hero's return in classical Greek tragedy and culture. Taking the pervasiveness of nostos ("return") stories in Greek literature as an indication of the nostos pattern's strong cultural resonance, the first half of the dissertation analyzes this resonance by approaching the pattern as an especially potent form of "ideological fantasy." While chapter one introduces the concept of ideological fantasy by briefly reviewing recent theories of fantasy, chapter two considers some of the tensions and antagonisms in classical Greek culture that the ideological fantasy of return addresses. Through an examination of marriage rituals and a reading of Lysias 1, I establish the point that the exogamic practices of classical Athens, in combination with the frequent need for men to be away from their homes, produced a network of misogynistic anxieties concerning the integrity and reproducibility of the household's masculine structures of authority. The fantasy of the hero's return, I argue, offers an ideal framework for negotiating this particular network of anxieties.; While the first two chapters thus consider the nostos fantasy as a general cultural phenomenon, the third and fourth chapters turn to the more specific question of how tragedies that center on a hero's return engage with this ideological fantasy. Although I take a number of tragedies into account, I pursue this question primarily through a sustained analysis of Euripides' Andromache. Few critics have even recognized Andromache as a nostos play, but I contend that it is so thoroughly saturated by patterns of return that it constitutes a critical compendium of them. Approaching the play as a highly compressed trilogy, I demonstrate that Andromache stages a powerfully felicitous and romantic nostos fantasy in its first movement, only to reverse and disenchant that fantasy in its second and third movements. This critical disenchantment reveals the nostos fantasy's romantic, and indeed nostalgic, consolations to be radically false and fetishistic. As my analysis of Andromache suggests, then, tragedy has the capacity to be a profoundly critical mode of discourse, one that can call into question the shaping fantasies of Athenian culture.