| Summary: | <p>This thesis explores the influence of gender on the choral voice of Greek tragedy. By looking internally at linguistic patterns across the choral voice of Tragedy as well as externally at contemporary sources for women in Athenian literature and society, the thesis argues that the tragedians differentiated the language of their female choruses in a variety of situations. These ‘feminine’ uses of language allow for a more positive interpretation of how female characters depicted on the stage corresponded to the real-life women in Athens than has often been presented in existing scholarship on this issue. </p>
<p>The focal point of the thesis is the choral voice, since this character-type tends to represent specific sub-sections of society whose characters and voices would have been more familiar to the original audience than the remote heroes and heroines of the myths. By combining modern sociolinguistic theory with a fresh look at sociological readings of female characters in Tragedy, the thesis adds nuance to the existing, often polarised, debates in this area of scholarship and uses new frames of analysis to deepen our understanding of how gender is used to characterise the choral voice in Tragedy.</p>
<p>Chapter 1 introduces modern sociolinguistic methodology and theory, and argues that it is possible to construct a ‘sociolinguistic approach’ which can be applied to the language of Tragedy. It introduces the three main recurring syntactic features which underpin the linguistic and literary analysis of the following chapter, and takes into account the methodological boundaries of using gender as a lens through which to study an artificial, male-constructed literary language. Chapter 2 applies this sociolinguistic approach to the choral voice across Tragedy, arguing that female choral language in the plays of all three tragedians is differentiated from that of male choruses in order to emphasise women’s verbal, social and physical marginality. Chapter 3 takes a broader sociological approach to analysing women’s voices in the Tragic chorus, arguing that the female choral voice not only represented male stereotypes of women’s speech, but also may have reflected some understanding of the societal realities facing contemporary women in Athens. Chapter 4 argues that in the context of lament, the language of the choral voice may have been differentiated less strongly along gendered lines than elsewhere in Greek culture. </p>
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