Between Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Reading the Newest Euripides Fragment

Abstract: In this paper, I consider the newly discovered fragment of Euripides' Ino (P. Phil. Nec. 23), focusing first on the play's hyper-Dionysiac plot, and then moving on to a reading of the fragment's two initial lines. Through tragic linguistic density and characteristically Euripidean irony, these lines, as I suggest, can be seen to intimate the intrinsic ambivalence of motherhood discussed in psychoanalysis and feminism. Wordplay on the ambiguity of "fullness"—as both the physicality of pregnancy and emotional replenishment—conveys that becoming a mother, having one's body filled—occupied by a human object destined to be lost—equals as such becoming replete with anger (sublimated, repressed, or acted out).