The Image Of Greek Women In Aristophanes' Comedy

Ancient Greek comedy was considered to be full of exaggerated speeches and absurd plots though it reflects some realities of the classical Greek society during the fifth century B.C.. Thus few of scholars attributed it to historical documents. Its anfractuous descriptions of Greek women image make it hard to interpret. And people who traced some traits of the scattered traditional women's descriptions, which correspond to the traditional historical documents, were confused and astonished when they read the anti-traditional women's image in the classical Greek society. They thought those women's image in the comedy could not reflect the real position and ideology of the women, and it was worthless to interpret them.This paper is divided into four parts. In the first chapter I try to introduce the comedies of Aristophanes, especially try to analyze Three Women Plays; Then in the next chapter, I focus on interpreting of the authenticity of traditional women's image, ranging from three periods of one's life time; In the third part, based on Three Women Plays, especially on Lysistrata, I try to interpret the anti-traditional, demagogue women and the reflections of the Athenian politics; and finally, in the last chapter, I discuss male and female ideological constructions and the way people criticizing about men, which further prove the lower social position of women. The main sources of this paper are Aristophanes' plays, but in order to explain this issue clearer, I also take advantage of other historical documents as many as I can. This paper finally proves that: there are some similar descriptions of women both in the plays and the traditional historical documents, which represent the conceptions of Athenian upper-society, but we could see the women's situations were more complicated from the comedies. Greek men may dominate the states' policies well enough, while they doubted deeply about mastering their women at the same time.