Cat's Core Collective

Pillars and Power: Women as the Emotional Backbone on Society in Literature and its Contribution to Modern Gender Roles

Have you ever heard someone tell a woman they are “too emotional”? If you have, why do you think that was said to them? Why are women considered emotional? Why do they seem to feel and care more than their male counterparts? Like many things, the past can inform us on modern issues. When speaking on the emotional nature of women, we can turn to ancient literature. From texts like the Orestia, we can see how women served as society’s emotional backbone. We see this in Women at the Graveside, where women embody grief. Outside of grief, we see how women’s emotional outbursts are a reaction to the actions of men. There is also a special kind of dynamic range only capable of being held by a mother. Mothers can have all emotions, from anger to sorrow to joy. 

Cyltemestra serves as the matriarch in the Orestria and, therefore, carries the emotional weight of her family while also carrying the family curse that her husband had placed on her. We see the power this balancing act of emotion and family places on Clytemestra; therefore, power comes from feeling. However, in modern society, sentiment is considered a sign of weakness and not a leadership quality. This belief plays a more prominent role in the continuation of sexist claims of emotion that allow for the continuation of gender roles. Check out this video for a modern take on women’s anger and why it okay for not just women but anyone to be angry.

Though women of ancient literature lived thousands of years ago, they still have the repressed generational anger of women. The silent anger she recalls seeing her mother experiencing is what most women feel their whole lives. This anger is from years, even generations, of bearing the weight of every emotion that you absorb through your family and others around you. Women who are mothers have a whole different level of emotional capacity, and to have children when you know how emotionally charged society is.

To see more of how women bear the emotional brunt of society, we can further explore the dynamic character of Clytemestra. As queen, she went through many emotional rollercoasters. However, the domino effect of the plot of Oresteia begins with the action of a man hungry for power and willing to do anything for a chance to win a battle and gain more control. Her husband, in an effort to please the gods, makes a sacrifice, but not just any sacrifice; their daughter was killed graphically in the name of war. The Chorus says, ” And so his hand to grasp his daughter’s sacrificial blade; did all this to support a war of vengeance for another woman’s bed” (Aeschylus, 226-229). A young girl has to lose her life for the emotional fits of a man, or worse, her father pining after a woman who is not her mother. She is not the only one affected, and her mother has now lost a child. Clytemestra does not act recklessly. Instead, she, in a planned and articulate way, kills her husband as revenge for killing their daughter. The Chorus is quick to assume that she has gone off the rails crazy and killed her husband. She defends her actions and character: “You patronize me like some little woman with no mind to call her own. I speak with a heart devoid of fear to those with wit to understand, and you can praise or condem me as you like its all the same to me” (Aeschylus, 1401-1406). Clyemesttra is a perfect example of the inability to repress emotions. She had experienced so many emotions, mostly negative ones, at the hands of her husband.

Her children are unaware of the emotional turmoil that Cyltemestra bore for the family and the people as both a mother and a queen, so they plot to kill her. In Women at the Graveside, her daughter Electra speaks so boldly of the hatred she has for her mother, ” She make stroke, by cannot make us calm, since my heart is like a savage wolf, deaded to a mother’s touch by wrath” (Aeschylus, 420-423). We need to understand why there is so much pain and agony in this family. Nicole Loraux offers an interesting thought on the concept of motherhood and mother’s sorrows in her essay The Doting Tale of a Mother. She is analyzing the play of Richard III, but the principle explored may allow for a better understanding of the familial curse of anger in the works of the Oresteia. She claims, “A mother’s sorrow is general in the sense that it is generic, a general sorrow that contains all mourning within its self” (Loraux, pg. 3). This claim is an exciting way to look at emotion from a female perspective, namely that most, if not all, emotions for women are cohesive into the feeling of sorrow. For example, Clytemestra’s revenge was the emotional responsibility for her killing Agamemnon, but her revenge was fulled by the sorrow she faced from her daughter’s death. Loraux also poses the question of the mother’s children concerning her sorrow, “A mother has given birth to mourning. Does a mother’s mourning give birth to all the sorrows of her progeny?” (Loraux, pg. 3). As we saw it was evident from how Electra spoke of her mother that she has nothing but rage and resentment for her. Still, what is the underlying emotion behind that? She did not just wake up one day and decide to hate her mother. She instead is in the stages of grief and sorrow and happens to be at the anger part that makes her murderous. Either way, if the reader takes the side of Electra or Clytemestra, they see the other having acted irrationally or with their heart on their wrist. This duality makes emotions seem wrong, or if they make us weak or less of a woman. This is a concept that has carried even into modern times. 

There is a real danger in women’s perspectives and emotions in literature. It can perpetuate modern society and work against progress to reinforce gender roles, especially in the workplace. A psychological study by Raymondie and Steiner in 2023 examined the possible differences in leadership evaluation where emotional labor is concerned. The study found that emotional labor did have a significant effect on the assessment of female CEOs and not males. One of the implications of this study is “the notion that gender stereotypes of emotions not only concern emotion expression but also how individuals are believed to experience their emotions” (Raymondie and Steiner). There is no single answer to any questions when it comes to gender inequality and discrimination based on emotions. These findings, on top of things like the pay gap, disproportionate hiring policies, limited maternity leave, and many other components of modern society, work to have emotions be the enemy of women. Literature helps to inform us of the complexity of emotion and how women have to absorb the emotions of the families and societies they are a part of. Emotions cannot boil down to one or two things. There are twists and turns, emotions are messy, and women are responsible for bearing all the emotions with a smile on their faces. If that smile slips, they turn into the crazy, emotional, irrational girl and not the woman who is secure in her emotions and levelheaded. Are women just letting their emotions get the best of them, or are they experiencing emotions like rage how a man does, rationally? 

Works Cited

Aeschylus. Oresteia. OUP Oxford, 2008.

Loraux, Nicole. Mothers in Mourning: With the Essay, of Amnesty and Its Opposite. Cornell UP, 1998.

Raymondie, Romain A., and Dirk D. Steiner. “Leader’s Conveyed Emotional Labor and Leadership Evaluations.” Journal of Personnel Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1027/1866-5888/a000337.