Review Exchange and the Maiden page 1
Alcestis
That women were strangers in their husbands' homes is most tellingly revealed in the Alcestis. Admetus tries to allay Heracles' worry, by assuring him that the person the family is mourning is not a family member, but a stranger. It is, of course, Admetus' wife, who may be an example of another of Ormand's feminine ambiguities: marriage as a form of death. Marriage meant the end of a secure, familiar life with one's parents, at home, and also the end of childhood. Thus, Alcestis may have accepted the physical death as just one more side of her marriage.
Deianeira
The first Sophoclean tragedy Ormand examines is Trachiniae, in which Deianeira falsely believes she is at the center of triangles in her marital world. The first triangle she thinks she is involved in is the one with Heracles and the river god Achelous who intends to marry her. Ormand explains that Deinaeira's tragedy lies in not seeing the true points of that triangle. It is Aphrodite who takes center stage, not Deianeira. The second triangle Deianeira mistakenly thinks she is involved in is the one with Heracles and his new bride, Iole, and Iole's father. The third triangle of Deinaeira's life is the only one in which she is involved, but here she misunderstands her role -- fatefully, because it proves the death of her husband. When the centaur Nessus attempted to rape her and then gave her instructions for a love potion, Nessus had no interest in Deianeira, but only in harming Heracles' prestige.
Ultimately, from beyond the grave, Nessus does get the best of the hero. The love potion mortally wounds Heracles, who, in his own words, is forced into the category of a woman by the pain. Homosocially, being a woman is meaningless. So even though he is dead, Nessus has the upper hand.
Antigone and Electra
Ormand examines the ramifications of being an unmarried woman in his study of Electra and Antigone. Ordinarily, inheritance passed to the sons, but in their absence it went to a daughter's husband. This made the woman wealthy almost in her own right, just as an astos woman was almost a citizen. Ormand shows Sophocles' representation of the epikleros as epitomizing the conflict in loyalties women have between their natal and marital homes.
Tecmessa
Tecmessa is the subject of the fourth chapter. Tecmessa is not the legal bride of Ajax, nor is she quite a concubine. She is, however, the mother of Ajax' son, and this is her only value to Ajax. A spear-won bride, Tecmessa continually struggles against this role.
Towards the end of Trachiniae, Heracles describes himself as a suffering maiden: "cries out like a parthenos...." and in the Ajax, the hero says he has been "made female." When men in tragedy must endure women's roles, they suffer and lose control. When Oedipus tries to make amends for his crimes, Creon steps in to strip him of control. Instead of exiling Oedipus, he leads him bride-like inside the house.
In the concluding chapter, Ormand explains how, ultimately, women remain mysteries in Sophocles' tragedies. Whether they die or stop participating in the dialogue, the women all end up silent:
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"Because women in fifth century Athens were supposed to be silent, to be kept out of public view, to be removed from a position of subjectivity, they become, in the Athenian imagination, ciphers: unbounded, unresolved, dangerous.... Sophocles' dramas represent women's marriages as a state of perpetual and unfulfilled longing."
Exchange and the Maiden is a difficult study. It is based on complicated ideas like homosocial competition and analogies that are at once figurative and literal. Also the premise is more involved than I've indicated here. If you're looking for insight into how Athenian men could have created and maintained such contradictory, subjugating categories for women, this is a good starting point.
