The Seba library treats Dejanira in 4 passages, across 2 authors (including David Konstan, Jung, Carl Gustav).
With Hercules all-powerful and Dejanira all too vulnerable, he is not of the class of people who are ‘not fit to slight’ her.
Konstan argues, via Aristotle, that Dejanira’s structural powerlessness relative to Heracles prevents her from experiencing or enacting legitimate anger, making her emotional passivity a function of political inequality rather than personal weakness.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006thesis
The capacity for anger depends on status, and where power is unevenly distributed between men and women, anger will be similarly asymmetrical.
This passage generalizes the Dejanira case into a structural principle: emotional capacity is conditioned by social power, with Dejanira serving as the paradigm case of feminine affect suppressed by inequality.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting
Deianeira, 123, 324
Jung’s index locates Deianeira at pages touching on deity symbols and deification rites, positioning her mythic role within the archetypal processes of transformation and numinous destruction.
, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting
a person who fails to respond angrily to a slight is not so much tolerant as stupid and servile… the inability to govern one’s passions bespeaks softness and a lack of self-control, and this, in popular ethics as well as in Aristotle, was imagined to be characteristic of women
This passage supplies the Aristotelian ethical framework within which Dejanira’s passivity is interpreted — the cultural coding of women as both prone to uncontrolled emotion and expected to suppress it creates the double bind that structures her tragedy.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006aside