As discussed on the analysis page, there were clear associations between female pain receivers and emotional pain, and male pain receivers and physical pain. This shows us that the pain in these four Greek tragedies is indeed gendered, and gendered in the way that one would expect.
We additionally marked up "direct" and "indirect" instances of pain, which was both a necessity and a way for us to add another layer to our analysis. We wondered if perhaps women would experience more indirect pain, since women are stereotypically thought to worry more about situations even when they have not directly been hurt. Our results did show a slight trend—women were slightly more likely to experience indirect pain than direct pain. On the other hand, male receivers of pain were almost evenly split between experiencing direct and indirect pain, but there were still 4 more instances of direct pain than indirect pain. This tells us that our hypothesis may have been correct, although we would need more data to draw a less tentative conclusion.
Our data shows that male receivers of pain were more likely to experience pain because of women, while female receivers of pain were more likely to experience pain because of men. The former trend was particularly noticeable, and this is corroborated by the fact that the most common recRel attributes in our data were "husband" and "children," which correspond to the infRel attributes of "wife" and "mother."
One reason for the prominence of this trend is that out of the four Greek tragedies we analyzed, Medea and Women of Trachis had the largest numbers of pain instances, and both plays feature a woman as one of the main characters—Medea in Medea, and Deianeira in Women of Trachis. There are several instances when Medea hurts her children, and a large part of the Women of Trachis storyline is about the consequences of Deianeira inadvertently causing harm to her husband Heracles. This aligns with the fact that women have often been portrayed in familial contexts in fiction, rather than situations outside of family and home.
Our third most common recRel and infRel attribute values was "lover," which appeared together in 21 pain instances. 13 of these instances were men inflicting pain upon women, so we can see that the four Greek tragedies we analyzed, men also inflict pain to the people they are close to. However, the correlation is weaker, which reveals a dichotomy where male inflictors of pain are more likely to be in a wider variety of situations, while female inflictors of pain are more likely to appear in familial situations than other situations.
When looking at women receiving pain due to men, 44% of the pain was directly inflicted. Furthermore, with the same genders, 55% of the pain was indirectly inflicted. Although the distribution was nearly equal, men tended to inflict pain indirectly more often to women than directly. On the other hand, when the inflictor was female, 55% inflicted pain directly, while 44% inflicted pain indirectly. So, women had a slight lean towards inflicting direct pain.
The most prominent trend in our data was the relationship between female inflictors of pain and Greek norms. There were 82 instances across the four tragedies where a female inflictor did not fit the norm, and only 2 instances where a female inflictor did fit the norm. In contrast, male inflictors of pain typically did fit Greek norms. There were 62 instances where a male inflictor fit the norm, and 12 instances where he did not. There were only 5 instances where the inflictor was a mixed gender group, and the split between fitting norms and not fitting norms was 2 to 3.
The fact that female inflictors of pain overwhelmingly did not fit Greek norms while male inflictors of pain typically did shows us that it is much less acceptable for women to inflict pain than it is for men.
However, we must note that we didn't research ancient Greek culture extensively for this project to create a broad set of norms, so the data could be skewed due to a lack of standardization. For this project, we decided that who fit the norm and who didn't was more subjective based on the characters of the play. This subjectivity may be one reason for the big correlation between female inflictors and not fitting norms, as Deianeira was often marked as not fitting Greek norms for inadvertently hurting Heracles due to the active role she took, and the slight switch in gender roles between the two.
We started our project a few weeks late because we had to switch topics, which meant that we lost some time that we could have had to refine our project and our project website. We did not standardize our infRel and recRel attributes, which is something that may have helped with collecting clearer data, and we did not check each other's markup for interpretive consistency across tragedies.
Furthermore, the conclusions we have drawn are limited by the fact that our corpus only consisted of four Greek tragedies. Extending our analysis to more Greek tragedies would allow us to be more certain about the patterns that we have observed and whether they hold true for Greek tragedies in general.
When we were first starting this project, we were looking at the receivers and inflictors of pain and their genders to find a correlation between these aspects using a classical definition of binary gender in Greek tragedies. Depictions of pain in Greek tragedies do differ between men and women. Women in our Greek tragedies have a high percentage of experiencing emotional, where men are associated more with experiencing physical pain. Furthermore, depictions of experiencing and inflicting pain in our Greek tragedies are not distributed equally among men and women. We found that men recieved pain from women rather than other men. We also found that women recieved pain from men rather than other women.
Many people in our group are interested in continuing this project in the future. We would like to create a set of baseline norms across Greek tragedies in order to accurately gauge the norm value for inflictors and recievers. We would also like to explore more inflictor-reciever relationship types.