288

Arresting Pleasure: What

Women Achieve through
Comic Inversion in Two Latin
Plays1
oooooooooo

Jennifer C. Wheat
University of Hawaii at Hilo

"I'm a Barbie Girl, In a Barbie World," chant the five year

old cheerleaders, whipping their blond hair as they rehearse their routine in a Texas town. The song goes on
"Undress me anywhereTouch me here, touch me there,
You can touch me everywhere ..." This chilling scenario was
on the news recently because some people thought such
lyrics inappropriate for little girls to be repeating in front
of a football team. Their mothers, however, saw nothing
1

My interest in comedy began when I took Kathy Geffcken's Roman

Comedy course at Wellesley. The readings and discussions in that
course did more for me in terms of opening up new ways of looking at
literature and life than any course I have had before or since. My teaching and research paths have both developed out of that course in ways
that have proved immensely rewarding for me and my students. Thank
you, Kathy!
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Jennifer C. Wheat

wrong with this routine, claiming that the girls associated

the undressing with what they do to their dolls, rather than
as the invitation that it so obviously is. When mindless
babble with a sinister undercurrent is allowed to pass cheerfully into the consciousness of children, programming
them for receptivity to manipulation by older males, it is
time to take a hard look at what our culture is doing to
women.
George Meredith, writing on comedy in 1873, proposed
that the test of a civilization is whether men consent to talk
on equal terms with their women, and to listen to them.
When one looks at America in 1997, a society riddled with
eroticized images, texts and instances of violence against
women, it is evident that many men are having difficulty listening to their women, and that women may not be doing
enough to make themselves heard. When women are conditioned to think of themselves as Barbies, we fall far short of
being civilized. Contemporary media promote images of
women which damage and oppress us by defining who we
are by what will generate box office hits and other sales revenue. The representation of a young woman undergoing
erotic asphyxiation replayed many times throughout the recent film "Rising Sun" is but one example, representing
woman as a disposable sexual commodity. Playwright Emily
Mann draws attention to a disturbing situation, commenting
in an interview, "It's rare to see violence between men and
women on stage or in film which is not somehow erotic"
(Betsko and Koenig 1987, 285). If we are not to be coopted
into this destructive mindset, we need to consider what it
takes to get men to talk with us as equals and to listen. One
way to do this is to explore representations of ourselves that
create positive models instead of perpetuating stereotypes
of victimization.
Certain types of comedy offer models which, if read and
taught consciously, can help us to interrogate dominant ide-

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ologies, and to change some of the degrading messages

about women that western culture has for centuries promoted. The comedies which I have chosen for this study
differ significantly from traditional literary comedy, involving a male hero around whom a new society may crystallize
after he has overcome a series of obstacles (see Frye 1957,
163). Instead women are the prime movers, acting to
change what is awry in their worlds, not to create romantic
tangles: marriage is not the telos of these comedies.
Women criticize gender imbalances, using humorous techniques, to derail male agendas that ignore their wishes or
trivialize them as sex objects. They can thus be seen as arresting pleasure, depriving male characters (and audiences) of traditional sources of gratification until these
males begin to pay attention to situations that are unacceptable.
Lysistrata is of course one such agent of social change,
but because she is already so well known, I will turn my attention here to two other plays which deserve to be better
known: Plautus' Casina and Hroswitha's Dulcitius. Both
plays represent women speaking from within a
male-dominated structure; both were written and originally
produced in patriarchal societies which relegated women
to inferior status. Both represent women interrogating
power structures from various angles, refusing to accept
degrading or offensive situations.
In order to understand how risky the actions of the
women in these two plays were, it is useful to review briefly
the constraints endured by women in Roman and in tenth
century German societies. In ancient Rome, whatever property a woman owned before marriage became her
husband's. Even her dowry was in theory irrecoverable,
and a husband had no legal obligation to maintain her with
it (Gardner 1991, 68), but in practice she might be able to
get it back, unless she had committed "certain grave of-

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tenses against the marriage" (ibid. 98). Later in the Republic,

a woman's property was completely separate from her
husband's, apart from her dowry, but it would revert to her
father if he were still living at the time of her divorce. The
Twelve Tables (451 B.C.E) allow a husband, but not a wife, to
initiate a divorce. Cicero Phil. 2.69 quotes the formula:
Illam suam suas res sibi habere iussit ex XII tabulis clavis ademit
exegit ("He ordered his woman to gather her possessions;
then he drove her out and took away her keys in accordance with the Twelve Tables"). A wife, on the other hand,
could take no punitive legal action against her husband
during the Republican period, even if he were caught in
adultery (Balsdon 1962, 215). The man, however, was free
to indulge his sexual appetites outside the marriage as long
as he confined himself to slave girls and freedwomen (ibid.
215). Women taken in adultery could be put to death with
their lovers on the spot (Csillag 1976). Cato the Censor, a
contemporary of Plautus, claimed that husbands had the
right to inflict the death penalty on their wives for drinking
or adultery (the former was thought to lead to the latter).
Valerius Maximus reports that in the days of Romulus, one
man who cudgeled his wife to death did so with the sanction of the community because she was thought to have set a
bad example (Pomeroy 1975, 153). A woman who was
judged insane could not divorce her husband, nor could
her curator, though her father could if he were alive
(Gardner 1991, 86).
Cultural expectations of married women during the
middle of the Roman Empire continue to restrict women's
rights to expression and movement, as Plutarch's Conjugalia
Praecepta reveal (see Pomeroy 1975, 154). Silence is clearly
the preferred mode of female public "discourse." Plutarch
asserts that a woman should not speak in public any more
than she should expose her arm: presumably a gesture that
could be interpreted as risque. A woman who speaks in front

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of outsiders reveals the emotions, character and disposition

of a babbler (Moralia 142D). Women are to do their talking
through their husbands. They should not have any feelings
of their own, but ought to adopt their husbands' moods no
matter what their own emotions may be (ibid. 140A). A
woman who tries to control her husband behaves disgracefully (ibid. 142E). Women are expected not only to put up
with their husbands' infidelities, but to welcome them as
gestures of respect. By having an affair with a servant or
prostitute, a man spares his wife his licentiousness, rowdy
drunkenness and insolence (ibid. HOB). Women are admonished not to leave home if their husbands cheat on them; by
so doing they lose their place to a rival.
Having thus set up the situation so that a woman is
trapped into complying with her husband's affairs, Plutarch
outlines the husband's "duties" to his wife. These amount to
little more than consolidating his control over her mind and
body. He is to read philosophy, and then distill it for her
presumably Plutarch fears that women might interpret texts
in their own way if information is not pre-digested for
themor perhaps he is not in favor of educating them to
read at all. A husband who fails to guide his wife into good
doctrines, inculcating some understanding of geometry and
astronomy in addition to the pre-masticated philosophy,
risks having her fall under the spell of magic, witchcraft and
the urge to dance (ibid. 145B-C)! Misshapen growths, which
Plutarch explicitly compares to uterine tumors, may form in
her mind, so that she may conceive (literally kuousi) many
weird things, base schemes and feelings. By linking unruly
thought processes with diseased sexuality, Plutarch intensifies male anxiety about what may happen when women deviate from the ruts that men have prescribed as safe for
them. Monstrous mental offspring may be set loose upon
the worldand by inference, women may become "pregnant" without the help of their husbands.

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By medieval times, when Hroswitha was writing in Germany, women had a sanctioned alternative to male control
in marriage. Virginity in the cloister at least provided freedom from the round of childbearing to ensure patriarchal
succession, though it seems to have offered yet another
method for men to control female sexuality. Fearing the
lure of sensual women, churchmen promote the notion
that women can transcend their "unfortunate sexuality"
and free themselves from "corporeal shackles" only
through a life of "sexless perfection" (Schuylenburg 1986,
31). In other words, a woman might, by overcoming what
defined her as female (fertility, physical weakness,
family-centered life, succumbing to desire) become an
"honorary male" (Clark 1989, 38). In connection with this
attitude, it is interesting to note that from the time of
Tacitus' Germania, continuing under the Salic law
codes, a high value was allotted to female chastity: serious
punishments awaited women who lost their virginity before
marriage or were caught in adultery (Schuylenburg 1986,
41). Many punishments for female sexual transgression
include some type of mutilation, chiefly of noses and ears
(ibid. 47). A rapist however, got a mere flogging under Salic
law (Shahar
1983, 18).
In order to ensure a smoothly run home, men were allowed to beat their wives within limits in medieval times,
but these limits varied. At one end was the fourteenth century legal code of Aardenburg in Flanders which entitled a
husband not only to beat his wife, but to slash her body
from head to foot, and warm his feet in her blood. Provided he succeeded in nursing her back to health afterward, he was immune from prosecution (ibid. 90).
This tolerance for domestic violence explicitly inscribed
in the legal code has tremendous importance not only for
the study of Hroswitha's plays, but for its continued effect
on male behavior in so many different cultures. In the soci-

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293

eties surveyed so far, it is apparent that women had little

protection from the whims of men, especially within marriage. Comedy provides one of the few artistic platforms
from which such a state of affairs can be challenged.
Northrop Frye's analysis of the genre as a movement away
from a society governed by "habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary
law and older characters" to one that is more flexible, characterized by "pragmatic freedom" (Frye 1957, 169) fits
Plautus' Casina. Cleostrata, the matrona of the play, deploys a number of strategies to divert her husband from his
infatuation with Casina, the young woman whom she has
raised to wed their son.
One strategy is to withhold food, frequently a source of
gratification in comedy, as in life. Her first words as she
takes the stageobsignate signas ("lock up the store cupboards," 144) indicate that because her husband has
offended her, she will have to use hunger and thirst as
weapons (149). Disorder in food images occurs early in the
play, as the two slaves who will act as surrogate opponents
for Cleostrata and Lysidamus in their battle over Casina's
destiny, jeer at each other. Olympio, Lysidamus' f lunkie,
taunts Chalinus, Cleostrata's minion, with being relegated
to country life and an unappealing diet:
post autem ruri nisi tu acervom ederis, aut quasi
lumbricus terram, quod te postules gustare quicquam,
numquam edepol leiunium ieiuniumst aeque atque ego
te ruri reddibo. (126-29)
Later, when we reach the country, unless you'll munch haystacks, or eat earth like a worm, if you should demand a
taste of anything, Hunger himself is not so hungry as I will
make you.2

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The irony of this threat turns out to be that Olympio himself \vill on several occasions be famished in the play,
largely because his allegiance to Lysidamus results in his exclusion from the feast along with his master.
Plautus represents Lysidamus himself as out of touch with
his need for food from his first entrance on stage. He announces, in a parody of the young man addled by love, that
too many cooks overlook the spice of love when adjusting
the seasoning:
coquos equidem nimis demiror, qui utuntur condimentis,
eos eo condimentis uno non utier, omnibus quod praestat.
Nam ubi amor condimentum inierit, cuivis placiturum
credo; neque salsum neque suave est potest esse
quicquam, ubi
amor non admiscetur; fel quod amarumst, id mel
faciet, hominem ex tristi
lepidum et lenem (219-23).
I can't fathom cooks who season things, but omit the one
spice that surpasses all. For when love spices up a dish, it
ought to please anyonewith love left out, no savor or
sweetness remains. Love turns bitter bile to honey, and enchants a gloomy man to gentleness and grace.

Love is not actual food to himmerely a spice which can

disguise other tastes, as Slater notes (1985, 76). Furthermore, what Lysidamus calls love is simply one-sided lust,
since Casina has no interest in him. When real hunger sets
in because Cleostrata has denied him food from the start
of the day, Lysidamus first rails at the cooks, who retaliate
by tipping over the pots and putting out the fire (774).
Next he tries to convince himself that attaining Casina matters more than satisfying his hunger:
Qui amat, tamen hercle si esurit, nullum esurit (795).

All translations are my own.

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295

As for one who loves, even when hunger strikes, he isn't

hungry.

He loftily waves away any thought of dinner, promising

himself a banquet on the morrow, after he has packed
Olympio and Casina off to the country where he plans to
join them. At this point, his erstwhile crony, Olympio, turns
against him, unwilling to starve any longer:
Ol. Esurio hercle atque adeo hau salubriter.
Ly. At ego amo. Ol. At ergo hercle nihili facio; tibi Amor
pro cibost mini ieiunitate iam dudum intestina
murmurant (801-3).
Ol. Well, dammit, I am hungrythis is not a healthy state to
be in.
Ly. But I am in love. Ol. I don't give a damn. Love may be
food for you, but my guts are grumbling with longing for
REAL (bod.

The suggestion here is that substituting love for food does

not really work, and expecting someone else to go hungry
because you happen to be infatuated especially does not
work. In the preceding scene, Olympio had complained of
suffering from hunger, whereas Lysidamus was insulated
from it by his passiontu amas; ego esurio et sitio: "you are in
lovebut I am famished and dying of thirst" (725). When
Lysidamus tried to boss him around, Olympio became so
surly that Lysidamus had to placate him by switching roles.
Olympio gets to assert mastership while Lysidamus acts as
his slave, a momentary inversion that highlights how
Lysidamus' inappropriate love has destabilized the hierarchy. One performance choice that might make this odd
scene work is to have the two of them stagger about the
stage, completely disoriented by their famished state.
Olympio continues to harp on the unavailability of food

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(cena modo sit cocta, 743; see also 746, 748), an indication of
the magnitude of the problem.
Lysidamus' misguided attitude toward food, ignoring
distinctions between spice and substance, love and
belly-nourishment signals that adultery is phantom food;
being insubstantial, it cannot nourish. The point
gradually emerges that men cut off from the sustenance of
marriage and a stable household routine are just as
vulnerable as a woman who has been evicted by her
husband. Early in the play, this isolation is a perilous
situation which Myrrhina warns Cleostrata she must avoid
at all costs:
My. ... insipiens,
semper tu huic verbo vitato abs tuo viro. Cl. Cui Verbo?
My. I foras mulier (208-11).
My. Don't be a foolyou must at all costs avoid hearing
those words from your husband. Cl. What words? My. Clear
out, woman.

Cleostrata and Myrrhina have already engaged in subversive activity by moving from their prescribed spaces
(homes) to the public space in between. Each had been on
the way to the other's house when they chance to meet in
the middle. In this space outside their husbands' jurisdiction, they assert their loyalty to each other: quod tibist aegre /
idem mihi est dividiae ("whatever troubles you will be my
burden too," 180-81). This declaration of unity in territory
usually off-limits to women lays groundwork for their taking charge of food, sex and spectacle, areas often manipulated by men in comedy. Women will eat their fill in the
course of this play, whereas men will find themselves not
only famished, but mocked for their pursuit of a female
who turns out to be male, as they founder in their quest for
sexual satisfaction outside the home. Women will achieve

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community through enjoyment of laughter as well as full

bellies.
The audience can share in the laughter, as Lysidamus'
confusion about food and sex escalates. In one scene,
Lysidamus and Olympio engage in wild word play about
the provisions which Olympio is to buy. Although Adams
(in Latin Sexual Vocabulary) does not document specific
equivalencies of organs to foods, the allusions to
phallic-looking fish and squid in the following seem
obvious:
Ly. Emito sepiolas, lopadas, lolligunculas,
hordeias ... soleas ...
Ol. Vin lingualcas? Ly. quid opus est quando uxor domi est

ea lingualca est nobis; nain numquam tacet. (493-98)

Ly. Go buy some calamari, cuttlefish and
limpets, barley fish ... slippertish ...
Ol. How about some lipfish? Ly. No need of thatwith the
wife at home I get plenty of lipshe never lets up.

The liquid sounds in these words roll off the tongue in an

obscenely playful manner. In addition, the overt sexuality
of Olympic's suggestion of lingualcas (literally 'little
tongues') is subverted in Lysidamus' pun about his wife's
propensity for nagging. Explicitly linking one fish to a body
part invites association of the other fish mentioned to
oilier organs. The word play dissolving into reminders of
domestic discord reminds us that when one partner offends another, basic needs will not be met. These "fish" will
never make it to the table or to the bedroom. In fact, the
disruption of domestic routine will only increaseas
1'urdalisca notes later, the cooks overturn the cooking pots
and douse the fire (aulas prevortunt, ignem restinguunt aqua
774). Drenched cooking fires and pots overturned may
symbolize frustrated sexual desires.

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Later in the play, more confusion between sexuality and

food emerges as Pardalisca teases Olympio about the nature of the obstacle he encounters when attempting to entertain his bride. She suggests a radish (911), the object
used to punish adulterers, or perhaps a cucumber (912).
Here a woman mocks male sexuality and uncertainty about
sex, a foil to the earlier scene in which two men giggled at
their cleverness in objectifying female sexuality as fish and
other choice morsels (molliculas escas 492). Gradually the
audience sees that the women have completely turned the
tables on the men. Overjoyed at Lysidamus' dismay when
dinner preparations disintegrate, Pardalisca proclaims that
they have created more fun than was ever had at the
Nemean or Olympic games (759-62) in which women, of
course did not compete. She describes how the women
want to shove the old man unfed from the house (incenatum ex
aedibus 776), so that they can swell their own bellies with food
(ut ipsae solae venires distendant suos 777). This image of the
swollen bellies suggests that in contrast to the starving men,
the women not only dine well, but become magically
pregnant, full of new life which they have created without
male assistance. Myrrhina's speech at the opening of Act V
celebrates their success:
Acceptae bene et commode eximus intus
ludos visere hue in viam nuptialis.
Numquam ecastor ullo die risi adaeque. (855-57)
Once we had feasted like royalty within,
We came out into the street to view the nuptial sports.
I never had such a good laugh in my life.

The \vomen can take all the credit for the success of the entertainment, as Myrrhina observes:

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nee fallaciam astutiorem ullus fecit

poeta atque haec fabre facta ab nobis. (860-61)
No poet ever dreamed up a cleverer trick than
the one we concocted.

As authors of their own script and directors of the production, the women have taken over a sphere that in Roman
times was completely dominated by males. They act in concert to expose Olympic and Lysidamus when each is rebuffed by a "woman" who had no interest in either of them.
To critics like Sue-Ellen Case who object that because all
roles in ancient plays were originally performed by men,
women cannot claim any sort of triumph for themselves, I
counter that the female characters by acting as plotmasters
here offer a significant challenge to a male-dominated society. Moreover, women's lack of access to these roles in
former times has no effect on their contemporary potential
for encouraging social change, since they can take them
now. Several issues that Plautus tackles in this play ring
true for twentieth century audiences: husbands' indifference to their wives' feelings, their folly in chasing women
younger than themselves, male inability to take no for an
answer unless it's accompanied by physical force.
One aspect of the play that might bother feminist critics
is the complete absence from the stage of the title character Casina. Several considerations emerge. Her absence
could indicate that she is powerless to intervene in her own
destiny, an assumption that would be in accord with the status of young women in Plautus' time. Her fate is played out
in the hands of others; she never appears to voice her own
desires. Her "true" bridegroom, however, does not appear
either, so for once there is some equality. Another way of
thinking about Casina's absence, albeit one that might not

300 Jennifer C. Wheat

have occurred to the play's original audiences, is that

woman as object has been removed from the stage, but
woman as speaking subject (i.e. Cleostrata especially) is
very much present. Moreover, by removing the possibility of
vicarious gratification for males in the audience, the play
emphasizes that women are not simply objects which serve
to satisfy the male gaze; they are people whose voices will be
heard. Men in the audience are in the position of
Lysidamus gazing at an imaginary maiden, who when they
try to 'grasp' her, will turn out to be a man. Women in the
audience may share Cleostrata's satisfaction at having prevented men from achieving illicit desires.
Some might argue that Plautus weakens the effect of these
subversions by inviting members of the audience to applaud
and then go off deceiving their wives with a prostitute:
qui faxit, clam uxorem ducet semper scortum quod volet;
verum qui non manibus clare quantum poterit plauserit, ei
pro scorto supponetur hircus unctus nautea. (1016-18)
May those who do this [i.e. applaud], find themselves always in the company of a slut of their own choosing, unbeknownst to their wives. As for those who don't clap as hard
as they can, let them wake alongside a billy-goat rank with
bilge.

This ending cannot, however, subvert what the whole play

has accomplished: the defeat and humiliation of a man
who had hoped to cheat on his wife. The strong show of female agency and imagination dominates the action:
Lysidamus stands rebuked and ostensibly reformed. It appears that change is possible when women step out of their
assigned behaviors to question and redefine codes of
sexual conduct.
One playwright who shows women doing exactly that is
Hroswitha. In her preface to the plays, she clearly an-

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nounces her own authorial presence as an allegorical character: Clamor Validus Gandershemensis: "the Strong Shout of
Gandersheim." By so styling herself, she presents herself as
a force stronger than the human woman who writes the
plays. She couples this forceful approach with the statement of her intention to revise the representations of
women popularized by the influential Roman playwright
Terence. For the first time in western history, a woman
playwright lays the issues out, directly confronting
male-authored representations of women:
Sunt etiam alii, sacris inhaerentes paginis, qui licet alia
gentilium spernant, Terentii tamen fingmentis frequentius
lectitant et dum dulcedine sermonis delectantur,
nefandarum notitia rerum maculantur. Unde ego, Clamor
Validus gandershemensis, non recusavi ilium imitari
dictando, dum
alii colunt legendo, quo eodem dictationis genere,
quo turpia lascivarum
incesta feminarum
recitabantur, laudabilis sacrarum castimonia virginum
iuxta mei facultatem ingenioli celebraretur. (Praefatio 2-3)
There are some who, dedicated to poring over scripture, although they shun other pagan writing, keep returning to
the fictions of Terence. Charmed by the sweetness of his
language, they are contaminated by their familiarity with
base matters. For this reason, I the Strong Shout of
Gandersheim, have not refrained from imitating his style.
Since others pay homage by reading it, I have used the same
style in which he chronicles the vile deeds of lewd women
to bear witness to the admirable chastity of consecrated virgins, as much as the paucity of my talent will allow.
Where Terence represented women as lewd, she will show
that they are models of chaste decorum. In short, she presents constructive alternatives to the demeaning stereo-

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types that an influential, highly regarded male author

helped imprint on the collective consciousness over the
course of a millennium; a daring and ambitious project for a
female religious. In the plays of Terence, women have
little agency. Their responses to events are rarely dramatized, but reach the audience second-hand, reported by the
male characters. They are raped by men who then spurn
them for their loss of virginity (as in The Mother-in-law).
They are rejected by lovers or families until they prove to be
of noble birth (as in The Eunuch and The Self-Tormentor).
"The best outcome they can hope for is marriage, with or
without their consent" (Case 1983, 536). The most striking
difference between Hroswitha's plays and those of Terence is
that in the former, women, not men take center stage, and
it is their challenge to male aggression that drives the
plot.
Another instance of Hroswitha's innovation is her revision of the source she uses for her play, the Bollandist life
of St. Anastatius (quoted in Sticca, 1970, 111-12). The first
thing we notice is that in the source it is Dulcitius, the male
bungler who is the primary subject of the account; little attention is paid the martyred girls. The text mainly concerns
itself with the ludicrous figure he cuts when covered with
soot, and with the reactions of people who take him for a
devil. In the source, there is no offer of marriage from
Diocletian as there is in Hroswitha. Her inclusion of it
seems a direct subversion of Terentian plots in which
women who desire to be married cannot until they are
proven to be free-born. Hroswitha's women are offered
marriage specifically because they are free-born, but they
refuse it in favor of a higher destiny. Men find that they do
not possess the power to define women's destiny.
The behavior of the female characters in the play is all
the more striking when we recall that under Salic law,
women had scant protection from sexual abuse. In her play,

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Hroswitha represents women eluding marriage with

powerful men who take for granted that they must submit.
The women, however, stand their ground even when
tortured. By refusing to give in to the demands of the
Roman Emperor and his military, these women expose the
fragility of the male hierarchy. At first the men cannot
conceive of the women except as weak objects to be
dominated and used. They soon discover that they are
outmatched intellectually. When Diocletian presses the
youngest sister (whom he mistakenly believes will be more
tractable than her elders) to accept pagan worship as an
honorable pursuit, she turns this concept on its head by
taking him through a basic exercise in logic, first getting him
to admit that when a slave is venerated as master, it is a
major disgrace (quae maior turp-itudo, quam ut servus
veneretur ut dominus? 1.7). She traps him in this argument
by defining his gods as slaves because they can be bought with
offerings (ab artifice pretio comparator ut empticius).
Because he cannot refute her reasoning, Diocletian grows
angry, instead dismissing her with threats of torture.
Undaunted by these threats, all the sisters frustrate their
oppressors by proclaiming that every horrible thing they
suffer brings them joy. Belief in eternal satisfaction enables
them to achieve detachment from physical pain. But they
take their attitude beyond indifference to pain, teasing the
men with the idea that pain actually brings them erotic
pleasure:
hoc optamus, hoc amplectimur, ut pro Christ! amore
suppliciis laceremur. (1.8)
Quanto acrius torqueor, tanto gloriosius exaltabor. (XII.2)
Our desire, which we long to embrace, is to be lashed with
torments for the love of Christ.

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The more fiercely I am tortured, the more gloriously I shall

be exalted.
Although the masochism may worry us in terms of legitimizing domestic violence, the significance of this scene
seems to be that women have reclaimed control over their
bodies and feelings from men who were trying to punish
their resistance. This theme reaches its height in the climax
of the play where Hirena, condemned to life in a brothel
by the Roman officer Sisinnius, is miraculously rescued by
heavenly messengers and placed on a mountaintop. Here,
pierced by an arrow, she becomes a martyr after her own
desires. Women's alliance with divinity has helped them escape the prison of their bodies, as Christian teaching of the
time would phrase it. They have avoided the fate that
awaited most women of the time: subservience to men's
sexual demands.
In the first half of the play, one man, Dulcitius, is denied
the opportunity to use women's bodies for his pleasure. Although he spies on them through a keyhole, the view is less
than satisfyingall he sees is them praying and singing. In
fact, the tables are turned very shortly when he himself becomes a spectacle, blackened from soot as he fondles some
cooking pots under the delusion that they are women. In
the second half of the play, another man (Sisinnius) is deprived of the chance to humiliate a woman by sending her
to the brothel. Hirena's integrity, both physical and spiritual, is miraculously preserved from damage. By adopting
the view that the death of the body in a virgin state is cause
for rejoicing, the women in this play have changed a potential tragedy into a triumph that can be regarded as comic.
By the close of this play, the rigid society (to use the
terms of Bergson and Frye) wherein men brutalize reluctant women for their pleasure and for the perpetuation of
their hierarchies, has been supplanted by a new order. The

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305

basis of this order is that Christians who model their

lives on those of the three virgins will enjoy eternal honor
and divine love, even if they suffer in this life. Those who
read the play may recognize that they can substitute a
heavenly for an earthly marriage (intraho aethereum regis
thalamum XIV. 3: "I shall enter into the heavenly bed
chamber of the ever-lasting king").
The three virgin martyrs also prove that they have freed
themselves from sexual cravings as the men in the play
have not. Their detachment from fears and needs arising
from preoccupations with the body allows them to redefine
death as mihi quam maxime gaudendum (XIV.3): "my greatest
source of joy." This subversion in which death becomes
more desirable than life completely confounds the men in
the play, who behave ridiculously when they try to
straighten the women out. In fact, the mundane phallicism
of the joy/death-bringing arrow is transformed in religious
terms. Male weapon does not serve male ends, but female
and divine ones. Much of the humor resides in the
spec-tacle of the men's incoherent fuming as they fight
back with allegations of madness and threats of violence.
Since the violence men use is greeted with enthusiasm
by the women, the audience is able to enjoy the joke at
men's expense. If the violence were shown to hurt, then this
would be a tragedy. The more the men repeat their
threatening gestures, the clearer it becomes that they are
fast running out of ways to humiliate the women. The men
have trapped themselves into that repetition of futile
actions that Bergson identifies as comic (1956, 71).
Sisinnius is a key example. Instead of charging up the
mountain to capture Hirena as he planned, he finds
himself mysteriously compelled to run around in circles at
the base, unable to stop. He is an automaton aware that
something is amiss, but powerless to change it.

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Jennifer C. Wheat

En montem circumeo; et semitam aliquoties repperiens,

nee ascensum comprehendere nee reditum queo repetere.
(XIV.2)
Look! I'm going round and round the mountain. I keep
finding the same path, but I can't seem to go up, nor to get
back out.
Here is another male enslaved by unslakeable desire, just as
the men in Lysistrata are dragged down by their cumbersome phalluses. Although Sisinnius thinks his weapon has
prevailed because he hits his target, that satisfaction vanishes when Hirena has the last word, redefining her death
as a victory, in the Christian scheme of things. She points
out that his act of violence will trap him in hell for eternity,
whereas she will be released from her body by its death,
and so from any outrages that can be inflicted on it. As a
result of being shot, she gains the martyr's palm and the
virgin's crown. In the terms outlined by Hroswitha, he
loses and she wins. What is comedy for the women turns
out to be tragedy for the men. By escaping a sexually determined fate, the women have not only avoided becoming
tragic objects, but in their spirited refusal to be cowed by
the men, they have created a comic framework for their
deaths.
In addition to control over women's bodies, another issue
contested in this play is that of sanity. The men accuse the
women of being crazy (ista dementius bacchatur 1.4), when it
is the men who turn out to have a shaky grip on reality.
Hirena describes Dulcitius as mente alienatus (IV.2), "estranged from his own mind," when he cuddles filthy
kitchen utensils under the delusion that they are the
women after whom he lusts. As he boasts of his shining
robes and radiant body, his delusion swells (nonne
splendidissimis vestibus indutus totoque corpore videor nitidus
VI.2: "Am I not gorgeous in my brightest garments and

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307

doesn't my entire body gleam?") In reality contact with the

pots has shredded and blackened his clothing so that his
own soldiers run from him as if he were a devil. Puzzled by
their desertion, he asks his wife what is wrong. Shaking her
head, she replies that the Christians have made a fool of
him (foetus es in derisum Christicolis VII. 1). Although his
wife has bluntly told him he is out of his mind and can't
even see it (non es sanae mentis ... quod patiebaris, ignorasti
VII. 1), he can envision no solution to his difficulties except
to punish the women, ordering them publicly stripped of
their clothing so that they can get a taste of the mockery he
has experienced. When the women's clothing magically resists removal by soldiers, Dulcitius sinks snoring into a
trance, further from possessing control and more than ever
an object of derision.
Sisinnius too loses control and is forced to admit that he
doesn't understand what is going on (ignorabam XIII.3,
ignoro quid agam XIV. 1). In a serious blow to his military
.uiihoiity, his soldiers challenge his handling of the situation. They charge him with jeopardizing everyone's welfare
by his craziness: si insanum caput diutius vivere sustines, te
i/)sum et nos perdes (XIV.2): "If you manage to keep your
crazy head alive any longer, you will destroy yourself and us
;is well." Perdes here has the double meaning of 'consign to
damnation' as well as 'ruin'. The soldiers appear to have
been subtly affected by the holy women, or perhaps have
consciously chosen to side with them, fearing that their
commander's conduct may plunge them into hell. Just as in
Casino, pleasure-driven men who refuse to relinquish control of a situation they cannot handle are exposed as damaging the common good. Women, on the other hand, are
represented as having the self-control necessary to put community first. By refusing to be bound by male decisions
about their destinies, women have disrupted the traditional
male narrative of gender ideology: they have chosen mar-

308

Jennifer C. Wheat

tyrdom over marriage, secure in their belief that a true

marriage with the king of heaven will follow. By asserting
the primacy of spiritual life, Hroswitha has desexualized
the female presence on stage. She has de-eroticized violence against women by representing men's attempts to
punish and torture them as absurdly ineffective, thus arresting pleasure on a number of levels.
In Casina, the female characters create a similar disruption by rescripting Lysidamus' desired telos of total erotic
bliss into one of complete sexual humiliation. The play
denaturalizes gender representation by representing two
deluded men attempting to seduce a man disguised as a
woman. Gender is represented as unstableappearance is
no guide to reality. Women shock and trick men into
backing off from taking their pleasure at the expense of
someone who isn't interested. By disarming men with techniques of comic inversion, women make clear that men do
not have unlimited license to pursue their own gratification with no regard to the wishes of others.
When plays like these are performed with an eye to exposing buried assumptions, they raise "moral problems
which cannot be neutralized by easy formulas" about release of aggression, as Ian Donaldson notes in speaking of
Restoration comedy (1970, 21). Such plays show women arresting pleasure in order to get men to listen to some urgent concerns. By giving careful thought to the plays we
read with our students, we can address problems that continue to deform relationships between men and women. If
we are to meet Meredith's test of a civilization, we must as
women give greater thought to how we represent ourselves
on stage, and we must promote cultural icons that will
catch the popular imagination in constructive ways. Maybe
we can teach the Barbie Girls a new song.

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309

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