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THE CLOTHED BODY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
17-19 January 2002S Blundell & N Rabinowitz - London & New York
Gender, dress and vase painting
In this paper we will be looking at interactions between women in all-female groups as represented on Attic vases in the last thirty years of the fifth century BCE. Despite vigorous debate, there is a lingering supposition that ancient Greek women, especially in Athens, were isolated from one another. But women do not seem isolated when you look at the vases.
Indeed women are shown primarily with other women. While there are many types of women's groups, but for the purposes of the paper we will be focusing on those in which interactions between women are signified by gestures with, or gifts of, clothing and accessories. The settings for these groups include marriage, adornment, wool-working, bathing, and ritual Although representations of women in groups date from the earliest black-figure period, we will be concentrating on red-figure vases from the end of the fifth century because we hypothesize a change in quality and quantity at that time, perhaps due to the Peloponnesian War. Moreover, certain of the vase shapes (for example, the cosmetics jar) allow the critic with fair confidence to assume a female audience; and these are the vases which we will be for the most part addressing in the paper.
The likelihood of a real-life female spectator allows the construction of a theoretical female gaze on two levels, both inside and outside the frame. How do clothing (especially when transparent) and gesture (especially when seemingly erotic) make relationships between women possible and apparent? To what extent are these relationships heightened by the presence of an internal gaze or touch? and to what extent does the addition of an Eros or of an internal male spectator change the focus of the female interaction?
This paper will make an intervention into discussions of the relationship of ideology, aesthetics, and referentiality. On these vases, women are idealized and sometimes compared to goddesses. What is more ideologically constraining, the possibility that these images strive to represent the way women "actually were" or that they sell them a bill of goods that instructs them in how to perform their gender?