Critical Evaluation
The Women of Trachis, recounting the last crisis in the life of Herakles, is the only surviving tragedy of Sophocles that ends in death for both of the chief characters. The tragedy also presents the devotion and love of ideal womanhood in Deianira and the heroic endurance and strength of ideal manhood in Herakles. The Women of Trachis has as its tragic protagonist not one person but a family of three. For this reason critics sometimes claim that the play lacks unity, since half is devoted to Deianira and half to Herakles, with neither appearing onstage at the same time. To consider this drama properly, however, one must regard the tragedies of Deianira, Herakles, and Hyllus as one large event instigated by the gods, carried out by human will, and transcended in the end by strength of character.
Although the play lacks the smoothness and facility of Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715), it is significant, and it treats the major problem of Sophocles’ dramatic career, that of human freedom. The problem is this: When events are determined by the will of the gods, as revealed in oracles and prophecies, and by the passionate compulsions of the human animal, freedom lies in learning the truth and accepting it—not passively but with all the force of one’s being. For one to be free one must knowingly seek to accomplish one’s destiny in harmony with divine law. In Sophocles that destiny is always hard and terrible, which makes the acceptance of it truly ennobling. This problem and its solution are at the heart of The Women of Trachis, which was probably written when the dramatist was in his sixties, an age when he looked at life fully and accurately. The play is a mature statement of Sophocles’ deepest convictions.
The action moves from ignorance to truth, and from misconceptions to a revelation of the total pattern imposed by divine will. Each of the three tragic characters acts from a lack of understanding and then must confront the awful truth. The audience sees this first in Deianira. Her greatest apprehension in the beginning is that her husband, Herakles, will not live much longer. Then she learns that he is both alive and returning home in triumph. She sympathizes with the most miserable of the captive women, Iole, only to learn that Herakles took Iole as his concubine. Deianira does not find fault with either Iole or Herakles, but determines to win her husband’s love by black magic. The potion is made from the poisoned gore of Nessus, the centaur that Herakles killed. After sending the deadly robe to Herakles, she realizes how dangerous it is. When her son Hyllus reviles and curses her for murdering Herakles by slow agony, she knows that she herself accomplished her worst fear. Her knowledge is subject to reversal upon reversal until the original prophecy and dread are fulfilled.
Deianira’s character is as much a part of this sequence as fate. She is a fearful, devoted, and rather gullible wife. Her only reason for resorting to magic is to regain Herakles’ love, and it wins for her his undying hatred, not to mention Hyllus’s condemnation. She does not excuse herself but accepts full responsibility for the deed she commits in ignorance, and she atones for it by suicide, choosing the noble method of stabbing herself. In that acceptance of her guilt and in that atonement, she achieves true freedom. Deianira’s tragic courage lifts her above the fate to which the weakness of her character brings her.
Herakles, in an ironic twist, is...
(This entire section contains 1150 words.)
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dying not from a foe but at the hands of a rather pathetic woman, which humiliates him tremendously. He bawls and rages in pain, wishing to murder his wife. As he cites his triumphs in killing beasts and monsters, the audience realizes that the beasts take their revenge through Nessus’s poisoned blood. The centaur, the most lustful of creatures, repays Herakles his lust; it is Herakles’ bestial lust for Iole that precipitates his doom. Ironically, the beast-slayer is possessed of the same violence and lechery as the beasts he killed, and his body is mortally infected with the centaur’s gore.
Once again the process of revelation begins. As Herakles learns that his death is being caused by Nessus’s cunning, it dawns on him that the prophecy of his death is being completed and that Deianira is an innocent agent of the gods. When this is driven home by Hyllus’s penitent and intrepid honesty, Herakles addresses himself to the fact of his death in earnest. He chooses the manner of his death freely, just as his wife does. He determines to be burned alive rather than suffer death by poison passively. In that resolve he shows the same tragic courage as Deianira. He seizes the terrible will of Zeus and makes it his own. The audience is aware that Herakles will be transfigured as a god on his funeral pyre, but the important thing for Sophocles is the heroic determination of Herakles to make his death his own, in which he, too, transcends fate.
The third tragic figure is Hyllus, the son of Herakles and Deianira. Like his parents, he acts in ignorance, must suffer the truth, and make an atonement. Hyllus lays a dreadful curse on his mother, thinking she murdered Herakles out of jealousy and spite. By the time he learns what actually happened, Deianira kills herself, and he bears some of the guilt for her death. He loves both of his parents. Thus, he finds himself in an unbearable situation. He atones in part by braving Herakles’ rage to justify his mother’s intentions, which in turn leads to Herakles’ recognition of the truth. Herakles, the audience recalls, recently dashed out the brains of a hapless messenger. Hyllus’s father makes two very hard demands on him and binds him to them by oath. The first is that he build the funeral pyre on which Herakles is to perish, thus taking a hand in the death of his father as well as his mother. The second is that Hyllus marry the woman he loathes—Iole, the “cause” of all the trouble. It seems likely that this forthcoming marriage will put an end to the blood-and-lust syndrome that destroys Hyllus’s parents. Hyllus shows his manliness in the fortitude with which he accepts both conditions.
The final statement of the play, “there is nothing here which is not Zeus,” expresses Sophocles’ faith that while the gods lay down the tragic circumstances of human life and that people fulfill these tragedies through inner compulsion, people can triumph over necessity by strength of character. The divine pattern imposes hopeless suffering, which gives people the opportunity to show their nobility. This is a stern faith, but a stern faith is essential in a hard world.