Sophocles, Dollhouse, and academia.edu

Cover of Dollhouse Epitaphs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spent Thursday evening updating my listing on academia.edu, and decided to upload a few conference papers, if I had any lying around that I was unlikely to write up for publication, but that people might be interested in reading.  In the end I settled on a few that were more likely to be of interest to non-classicists.  So I have uploaded one on Helen in the Penelopiad, and one on Atanarjuat and the Oresteia, in addition to the old "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Greek Hero Revisited" which is by far the most widely-read piece I have ever written.  On looking through my other conference papers I found another that might interest Whedonites, on Sophocles and Dollhouse, but it isn't in shape to be seen yet (quite literally; I can only find the outline, and it needs rewriting).  So that's what I've been doing today.  

Was this what needs to be done? Or, to put it another way, was it the most urgent of the tasks before me? Well, hardly.  But in fact that paper raised some very interesting questions, at least for me, and it is a pleasure to think through some of them again.

a week of Sacrificial Virgins

James Murray, editor and philologist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spent the week putting in a little work every day collaborating with Lauren on our paper on Sacrificial Virgins in the Whedonverse, of which we now have a complete draft, approximately twice as long as anything we'd actually be presenting; so stage two, cutting it down to size and adding pictures, is next week.

We're comparing sacrifice of virgins in Greek tragedy to the same persistent trope in the Whedonverse.( Or do we mean motif?  And what is the difference?  Must check my Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (1), which I just downloaded (2)(3)(4)...)


I am running into a problem with our basic premise.  Sacrifice of virgins is a motif that shows up absolutely everywhere.  Andromeda for a start.  Every fairytale where the knight saves the princess from the monster-of-the-week.  I've just checked the Stith-Thompson searchable online index (http://storysearch.symbolicstudies.org/ ) and there are 318 motifs involving "princesses"; 159 involving "maidens"; 98 involving "virgins" (and another 95 involving the Virgin Mary).  Most of these aren't about virgin sacrifice, but the prevalence of stories about virgins/maidens/(always virgin) princesses demonstrates the persistent fascination Western culture has always had with the post-pubescent pre-marital phase of the female life cycle.  Sacrifice of women in that phase is always represented as particularly powerful in several ways (both magically or religiously efficacious, and emotionally wrenching), because of the supreme value of the victim, sacrificed at her moment of greatest desirability and perceived worth to the community.