Week 5: Jasmine Amin

In the play, Lysistrata, the emerging theme is feminism. The main character, Lysistrata, wants to end the war that is occurring in Athens, and her solution is to have all the women withhold having sex with their husbands. Lysistrata herself states that women are ignorant and are not given a bigger role in society other than to marry and raise children. Her wish, along with other women of Greece, is to have women make an impact on the world and change history. She concurs that more involvement needs to be made by women in society.

Lysistrata's speech about wool is a clever use of a metaphor in comparing womens' duties to Athens as a whole. This is apparent in the passage between her and the Commissioner:

Do you know anything about weaving?
Say the yarn gets tangled: we thread it
this way and that through the skein, up and down,
until it's free. And it's like that with war.
We'll send our envoys
up and down, this way and that, all over Greece,
until it's finished (Lysistrata, 198-204)

In this passage, Lysistrata is fed up with how society looks down upon women and says that women "mold society" into what it is today, by being able to fix bad situations, as is represented in the line, "Say the yarn gets tangled: we thread it / this way and that through the skein, up and down/ until it's free " (199-201). The yarn being " threaded this way and that, up and down" is a symbol of unity, of how Athens is attempting to keep society together as a whole. Women are the fabric of the community, because without them, the world would not function the way it does. In other words, Lysistrata is also describing the distress she feels about the war. She is stressing the unfairness of the men being taken away from their families to fight in a useless war. The passage is a contrast between the way men think (war) and the way women think (peace). In Lysistrata's point of view, if women were in charge, there would be no war. "Untangling wool" takes great patience, and men only believe in violence and cruel acts in war, whereas women can handle any type of situation with a more caring nature.

Continuing her speech, Lysistrata goes on to state that cruel men need to be turned away from society, that they are spoiling the earth with their presence, "Isn't there too much dirt here in Athens? You must wash those men away (208-209). In order for Athens to stay together as a city, "unclean" individuals need to be removed from power, so that the "wool" or "city" won't be spoiled.