Analysis Of Gender Relations In Europe Where Bailey Peters Tragedy

In the fifth century BC, Athenians attached great importance to the continuation of their families. In their concept, the family is not only tied by blood relationship, but also means a community which consisted of people who sacrifice to the same ancestor. And the male heir would take all the religious obligations. Therefore, childlessness, particularly without any male heir, would threaten the continuation of the family. In order to ensure the continuation of the family, the Athenians through the conclusion of legal marriage and adopted children to obtain the heir. Since the Athenians thought highly of their family lineage, they were always excessive anxiety about women's sexual chastity, which made women feel uneasy. Corresponding to these, Athenians set different gender roles for male and female, they formed a so-called "masculine" and "feminine" concept. Euripides'tragedies, as the social cultural soundboard, not only reflected the social life of Athens at that time, but also showed the gender roles in the social cultural. His tragedies had both "bad women" and "female models ", both "disordered" gender relationship, and "ideal" gender relations. There hid different degrees of sex reversal in these works, these reversals may broke the family orders, even endangered the survival of family. But in the end, Euripides would by means of some clever tricks to revise these reversals. He made people back to their own position, return to their own roles. And the way which the writer deal with his characters and plots, showed his concept of the gender.This text is divided into three chapters. The first chapter introduces the family, marriage and gender roles in the fifth century BC Athenian society. In Chapter Two and Chapter Three, I search into the gender relations in Euripides'tragedies. The second chapter instanced some "disordered" relationships in Euripides'works. The third chapter first shows the "ideal" examples in Euripides'tragedies, and then analyzes how the writer revised those reverse gender roles, and this indicates Euripides'gender conception.