Whedon meets Euripides, redux

Finally having some time free, after teaching, marking, submitting, seeing family, and collapsing,  my colleague and I are tackling our "Sacrificial Virgins" paper again.  For some reason this has been surprisingly difficult to finish; after 3 days' work we realised this was because we were trying to fit in every single thing either of us had ever thought about Buffy, Euripides, or Sacrificial Virgins.

On reflection, however,  it is quite possible that we will write again on tragedy, pop culture, virgins, or some combination thereof, so some of  these thoughts can surely go in the next paper.

We have therefore after long and careful thought produced an outline for the current paper, which I shall reproduce here since, as article outlines go, it is a model, a succinct template which I am sure will be useful to many others.  In the interests of serving the needs of our colleagues, as little as possible has been withheld to protect our results before publication:

Happy New Year, all.

Female epigram writers and River Tam (sadly, not)

Iphigenie (1862) by Anselm Feuerbach (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our abstract for a Firefly collection was turned down (a colleague and I submitted one on sacrificial virgins, Iphigenia, and River Tam), so it's back to work in Classics.  I've submitted another abstract on female epigram-writers in antiquity; we'll see if it flies.  Meanwhile, my research files are in spectacularly good shape, and I have ported all my old Filemaker databases into .csv files so that I can actually get at the information contained therein, for the first time in several years. This might be procrastination except that it was possible that I actually needed it for the epigram abstract.  (I admit that once the work was done, I didn't find anything useful.)

Tomorrow: BC Election, and reading Iphigenia at Aulis, for a Sacrificial Virgin article.  (Another one).  Wednesday: Teaching "Cleopatra the Hellenistic Monarch" to an audience of 12 year olds.  And contemplating Alice Oswald, again, at last.  I shall begin, I think, by rereading my notes, and this blog.

River Tam, fridged (not)

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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.