Wasps or Throwing Rocks at Old Men Generally Ends Badly for Everyone Involved

Jae Keitamo

Instructor: Dale Carrico

GSI: Jerilyn Sambrooke

November 21, 2016

Wasps

or

Throwing Rocks at Old Men Generally Ends Badly for Everyone Involved

Aristophanes’ Wasps employs classic literary techniques like metaphor, simile, hyperbole and mood, save to name a few.  For this paper I chose to focus on two of the more colorful, though perhaps less obvious, techniques to analyze how the figure of The Wasp functions to represent the looming threat of violent chaos that accompanies a group of sharp-tongued, curmudgeonly jury-goers.  The first technique of zoomorphism overlays a tangible iteration of the figurative wasp on the otherwise common human characters in the play.  The second technique is the use of imagery and onomatopoeia which, when coupled together, illustrate and color the actions of the figure allowing for new levels of hyperbole to better convey the spitefulness of the elderly horde.  

The passage of text spoken by Bdelycleon to Xanthias begins on line 224 and concludes on line 228.  The conversation between the men concerns how best to deal with the approaching mob of cantankerous old men who seek to add Philocleon to their efforts.  Rebuffing Xanthias’s notion to disperse the “gang of old geezers” (224:225) by pelting them with rocks, Bdelycleon warns the action will only provoke a violent retaliation by the men, likening them to a swarm of wasps whose nest has been disturbed.  The conversation leading up to this passage refers to the men only as men, making no zoomorphic references, but in his first sentence Bdelycleon transitions from man to insect by way of simile, thus allowing for the exaggerated language that follows.  The analogy of Wasps is predicated on a shared knowledge of the resulting havoc born from disturbing a wasps’ nest.  Appealing to the variety of senses triggered by an encounter with a swarm of angry wasps, Aristophanes successfully evokes the touch, sight, and sound of the impending bedlam as a means to highlight to the altercation’s disarray through figurative imagery.

Men have no stingers but analogous to the angry wasps and the stings which come from their butts are the sharp tongues of old men and the pain their words inflict.  Bdelycleon says the old men know how to use their stingers, suggesting he has previously dealt with their cutting verbal assaults, and been pained by them.  Men cannot fly but the visual cue of the attack engenders images of hands waving erratically at clouds of wasps as they violently encircle their victim.  Their size, coupled with the frantic nature of the encounter, makes them hard to see but the visual imagery of a bonfire reimagines the men-turned-wasps as sparks splintering from the flames, glowing brightly against the night sky - sparks capable of inflicting a pain similar to a wasps’ sting should the ember make contact with bare skin. 

The onomatopoetic language in this passage is the explicit “whirr” (226) attributed to the constant humming of the wasps the men have become.  But the whirring of the wasps also grounds the analogy back in the “gang” (224) of men as men in the form in the constant complaining and grumbling typical of old men as well as in the cutting dialogue to which Bdelycleon alluded when first speaking of their stings.  

The rhetorical effect achieved in Wasps is that of elevated satire.  The use of zoomorphic language enhances the already hyperbolic tone of the play and presents new perspectives through which the story can be told and understood.  However farcical the narrative may appear, the figure of the wasp is rendered more believable because its realistic characteristics are recognizable and relatable, even when they are applied to non-insect bodies.  As a result, the words and deeds of the old men take on colorful new depths when demonstrated through a figurative insect observed to bring nothing but trouble and pain.