Endgames: the literary fates of Iphigeneia and Jephthah’s daughter

The story of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis (Cypria, Aeschylus, Euripides) and the Old Testament account of Jephthah the Gileadite giving his only daughter as a burnt offering to Yahweh (Judges 11) have fascinated German authors, poets and playwrights over the centuries.  The striking similarities do not operate solely at the plot level: for the sake of military victory and political gain two young women are sacrificed by fathers who claim to love them.  Both accounts have also sparked controversy because of their ambiguous endings: Iphigeneia is either sacrificed on the altar or saved by Artemis through the substitution of a hind; Jephthah’s nameless daughter is either offered as a holocaust or dedicated to lifelong chastity in Yahweh’s service.  The open endings permit writers to exploit these stories, forcing closure on them to particular polemical ends.  Workings of the stories revolve around two central conflicts: the private realm versus the public sphere and culture versus barbarism, reason versus myth.  My paper will concentrate primarily on the former.  It will ask whether it is significant that the victims are teenage girls, and will consider how and to what ends dramatists, poets and novelists have explored the encroachment of the male domain of politics and military conflict into family life.