Power Dynamics

Written for HM&FNART 102: Traversing Differences with Critical and Creative Thinking: Global Issues (Instructor: Michael Kowalchuk)

The sexual power in intimate relationships is an exemplary instrument with which ordinary social structures can be disassembled. In Aristophanes’ play, Lysistrata, women withhold sex from their husbands with the motive to put an end to the Peloponnesian War. This attempt transformed personal, intimate relationships into a political form of resistance. Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, on the other hand, followed the transformed relationship between two characters, Marianne and Connell. Rooney’s story of their lives offered a more subtle, contemporary meditation on intimacy, class roles, and emotional control and manipulation between her characters. Despite the two tales being separated by a millennium, they both scrutinize how individuals negotiate power in relationships and, by extension, how that power reflects broader systems of dominance. Oftentimes, these private dynamics mirror and reshape the broader social and political structures that govern people’s lives. While Lysistrata dramatizes sexual control as an explicit political strategy, Normal People exposes how emotional control is internalized and influenced by a variety of factors. Both works suggest that control in intimate relationships is never independent of the social structures that make up identity and agency.

To start to understand how control operates in Normal People and Lysistrata, it is first of all important to situate each text in its respective cultural and historical context. Lysistrata was written during the Peloponnesian War, a lengthy and brutal conflict between Athens and Sparta that provided the backdrop to Aristophanes’ searing political satire. The play imagines an unlikely scenario where women from all across Greece come together to secure an end to the conflict by denying sex to their husbands, thereby forcing them into negotiating peace. The radical supposition inverts traditional gender roles, and puts sexual agency into women’s hands, albeit through comic exaggeration. Conversely, Normal People is set in contemporary Ireland and traces the lives of two young people, Marianne, a wealthy but emotionally battered girl, and Connell, a boy from a single mother in a working-class household who is trying to come to terms with his own identity. The two embark on a complex and often painful romantic relationship that develops and changes throughout the novel, continually. The book explores how factors such as class and emotional trauma influence who has control within relationships set against a backdrop of social mobility and educational privilege. Unlike Lysistrata, Rooney’s characters are shaped by internal conflict rather than war. They struggle to communicate, to be vulnerable, and to love without the brooding sense of domination and submission. Aristophanes may emphasize that political action can be achieved through sexual control, but Rooney’s approach to power dynamics presents the idea that individual emotional control can be used as a shield as well as a form of dominance over one’s partner. In both cases, the exercise of control, whether explicit or subconscious, becomes a central mechanism through which power is negotiated.

Aristophanes’ Lysistrata boldly asserts that sexual agency can be wielded as a form of political control. Lysistrata, frustrated by the endless war and the passivity of men, organizes a sex strike among the women of Greece. She declares, “Now, ladies, if we want to force the men to have a peace, well then, we must give up…[sex]” (Aristophanes 11). This act, while comedic, is deeply subversive. In classical Athens, women were excluded from political life and confined largely to performing domestic roles in their households. But in Lysistrata, they occupy the only sphere of authority they possess, the bedroom, as a site for determining the course of what they perceived as a national crisis. The final surrender of the men to their demands undermines the victory of their campaign. The comic tone of male desperation underscores the manner in which female sexuality, often perceived as a domestic or passive force, can be a site of power and resistance. Further, Lysistrata’s leadership is not based on brute force but clever negotiation. She manipulates gendered expectations, aware that men think about women first and foremost as sexual, and leverages that to their detriment. Through doing so, Aristophanes is critiquing patriarchal ideology, which holds women to be unpolitical. Lysistrata becomes a sexual as well as rhetorical dominatrix, demonstrating how domination is not always physical but can also be psychological and ideological.

While Lysistrata exercises control as an explicit, group act of resistance, Normal People examines control as a fragmented, unconscious response to emotional vulnerability. Rooney’s protagonists, Marianne and Connell, enjoy a relationship marked by miscommunication, shame, and role reversal. Their closeness is less marked by explicit control and more by internalized fear and desperation. A study done by Robert Körner and Astrid Schütz dissected how relationship quality is affected by the positional powers of the individuals in the relationship. This was done by surveying those in heterosexual relationships in Germany. Questions revolved around education, financial status, decision making, and overall satisfaction. It was found that couples who both feel they can assert their preferences in important decisions report higher relationship satisfaction (Körner). This aligns with the interpersonal mechanisms in Normal People, where Marianne and Connell’s struggle with openness in communication and exposing themselves to vulnerability are moments demonstrating their felt lack of control in the relationship. The difficulty they have articulating desires and needs can be a function of internalized views of their agency and worth, which influence relational satisfaction. For instance, Connell first asks Marianne to hide their relationship in high school because she is unpopular, and he wants to protect his social status. The request, while presented passively, is an exercise in control of Marianne’s identity and emotional security. She complies, demonstrating her readiness to surrender emotionally in order to gain love. This control is not one of malice but a highly ingrained desire for control that stems from personal insecurities.

Marianne also practices control, typically through emotional withdrawal or in relationships where she is controlled physically or emotionally. Her background of family abuse determines her sense of self-worth, as she later tells Connell, “Maybe I want to be treated badly, she says. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person” (Rooney 138). By this internalizing of trauma, others can control her, but it also is a way of controlling herself: she rejects love, isolates herself, and harms herself as proof of worth. Her surrender is, in some way, its own source of empowerment and a melancholy exercise in control over the way she feels about love and hurt. In Rooney’s world, power is less theatrically drama-filled than in Lysistrata, but no less significant. It is framed in silence, uncertainty, and weakness.

Aristophanes re-describes power in Lysistrata not in war or politics but in the space of the home and the erotic space long occupied by women and deemed apolitical by men. The titular character orchestrates a sex strike that leverages men’s desires against their militaristic impulses, reframing sexuality as a site of agency rather than passivity. “We’ll win them over,” Lysistrata insists, using sexual refusal as a radical tactic of resistance (Aristophanes 14). Her leadership unites women across enemy city-states, illustrating that collective action, not individual seduction, is the true source of their power. Such solidarity is also a departure from the dysfunctional divisiveness of masculine politics, which on stage in the play is shown as boisterous and unproductive. Furthermore, in taking over the Acropolis, the heart of Athenian treasury and thus representative of masculine power, the women assert not only sexual control but also political and economic power. The farcical presentation of men rendered absurd by their unchecked passions in the play accentuates the satire and thus Aristophanes exposes the instability of male dominance and the illogicality of women’s exclusion from civic life. While the play reinstates patriarchal normalcy at its conclusion, the upending of roles for the moment is a formidable critique of gendered hierarchy and presents a vision, however humorous, of female political power.

Where Lysistrata makes gender the controlling axis, Normal People combines gender and class and shows how intimacy is shaped by social and economic status. Connell’s working-class background and Marianne’s privilege invert traditional gender roles, as he is more verbally intelligent and ashamed of his poverty, while she is economically secure and emotionally destitute. Their socioeconomic disparity dictates the manner in which they enact control. The fact that Connell cannot afford tuition without a scholarship makes him insecure and bolsters his sense of inadequacy. Marianne, who is economically advantaged, is normally more secure, but her own traumas undermine her confidence. Emotional labor, normally the domain of women, is shared by both of them, but unevenly distributed. For example, when Connell is depressed and unable to bring himself to ask Marianne to allow him to stay in her flat, he says, “It just felt too much like asking her for money. He and Marianne never talked about money. They had never talked, for example, about the fact that her mother paid his mother money to scrub their floors and hang their laundry, or about the fact that this money circulated indirectly to Connell, who spent it, as often as not, on Marianne. He hated having to think about things like that.” (Rooney 127). Connell’s reluctance is not just determined by pride but also by the internalized belief that asking for help undermines his masculinity. This moment illustrates how class determines the way that someone may understand themselves as being valuable in relationships and how control of one’s emotions becomes a survival tactic.

While Normal People portrays a reversal of traditional gender roles, with Connell being more emotionally articulate and Marianne more materially secure, the study by Körner and Schütz suggests that it’s not just objective measures of power like income or education that matter. Their research found that couples’ relationship satisfaction was predicted far more by experienced power, or how influential or heard each partner feel, than by any structural or material advantage. In fact, even large differences in income or status had little effect unless they shaped someone’s subjective sense of power. The subjective equilibrium of power, or what each person thinks about exercising power in the relationship, is what matters. This is an impression that is perhaps colored by past experience, such as Marianne’s violent domestic background, and therefore her feelings of agency and control are likely to be compromised. Unlike Lysistrata, where roles of gender are rigidly defined and satirized, Normal People presents a world where identity is fluid, and psychological rather than sexual power is exercised. Rooney contends that control based on class and trauma can be coercive and complicated to the same degree as the overt power maneuvers of Aristophanes’ comedy.

Genre plays a critical role in shaping how control is portrayed in each text. Aristophanes uses satire and farce to exaggerate gender relations, referencing the illogic of war and the randomness of male hegemony. The takeover of the Acropolis by women and their withholding of sex both have comic and transgressive effects. Laughter created among the audience does not neutralize the political message, rather, it enables Aristophanes to condemn conventions of society under the guise of humor. Rooney, however, employs psychological realism in portraying relations of power as intimate, mysterious, and often tormenting. The reader is not alienated through laughter but is initiated into the raw emotional lives of the characters. Each shift in their relationship is charged with ambiguity. Marianne and Connell’s inability to stand up for themselves is not comic but a tragedy of postmodern disconnection. Where Lysistrata demonstrates power as external, performative, and collective, Normal People illustrates it as internal, personal, and individual. These generic differences do not work to exclude the comparison but work to demonstrate how power functions in different literary forms. Ultimately, both Lysistrata and Normal People show that relational control is a reflection of the larger social structures in which individuals are a part of. Aristophanes’ women reclaim power by politicizing their sexuality in a world that shuts them out of political authority. Rooney’s characters struggle with affective control in a world marked by economic disparity, emotional repression, and social performance. In Lysistrata, the women hold power briefly by reversing expectations, but their power is always dependent upon how their sexuality can be leveraged. The play’s conclusion, though celebratory, reinstates the order of things, peace has been gained, but the patriarchal system still exists. Power is not neatly resolved in Normal People; the book concludes instead in a suspended state with Connell and Marianne still uncertain about what their future holds together. Rooney offers no catharsis, only the suggestion that true intimacy requires giving up control and the risk of vulnerability. Control is in both works a protection and a prison, necessary for survival, but all too often blocking true connection.

Both texts grapple with consent, not just physical or sexual, but relational and emotional. Marianne’s willingness to engage in emotionally abusive relationships makes it difficult to define victimhood traditionally, because she does choose some relationships, however it’s through trauma and skewed self-perception. It creates huge questions about what agency can tolerate if one’s desire is entangled with pain. In Lysistrata, consent works differently; the women collectively decide to deny sex, but the men are depicted as powerless in the face of lust, suggesting a reversal of usual patterns of consent. But Aristophanes ultimately reinscribes patriarchal norms by re-establishing order through heterosexual union. In both texts, consent is a lens through which power is negotiated, not always freely but often as a function of deeper social and psychological coercion. In addition, communication, or more appropriately the lack thereof, is a primary mechanism by which control is exercised in both novels. In Normal People, miscommunication is not merely a literary device but a demonstration of emotional control. Connell’s failure to communicate his needs, and Marianne’s refusal to discuss her pain, create a dynamic by which power is forever shifting but not necessarily acknowledged. Their muteness may be interpreted both as a defense and an act of manipulation, illustrating how language, or a lack thereof, can establish relational power. In Lysistrata, on the other hand, speech is an explicit instrument of persuasion and authority. Lysistrata‘s rhetorical proficiency distinguishes her from the rest of the women and empowers her to become a leader. The play brings speech to the front as a political endeavor, and verbal combat between the sexes sorting out who is in charge. So while Aristophanes stages speech as public and planned out, Rooney presents it as intimate and fraught, pointing to the ways that speech itself can be an arena for emotional negotiation.

In spite of being separated by genres and centuries, Lysistrata and Normal People each make similarly profound remarks on the nature of control in love affairs. Aristophanes presents sexual control as a war drama of resistance against war and patriarchy, while Rooney investigates emotional control as a psychological response to trauma, class, and insecurity. Both authors suggest that intimacy can never be power-free and that negotiations of control, by way of realism or satire, reflect the social and emotional landscapes of their time. In both cases, control is not so much domination, but how individuals assert identity, seek agency, and negotiate the vulnerabilities of love. In Aristophanes’ world, command can conquer a war; in Rooney’s, it sparks a revolution of the heart, a silent, tormented, and deeply human one at that. Amid an increasingly sensitive era for observing how power is wielded in intimate and public relations, Lysistrata and Normal People remain universally pertinent. They remind us that control is not always overt or authoritarian, at times, it is softly uttered, internalized, or even self-imposed. Whether through the laughter of ancient satire or the silence of modern realism, both works reveal the enduring complexity of love, power, and sovereignty. As readers and as participants in our own relationships, we are challenged to ask not only how we dominate, but how we might unlearn it in the name of empathy, vulnerability, and respect.

Works Cited 

Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Translated by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University Nanaimo, BC Canada, 2008.

Körner, Robert, and Astrid Schütz. “Power in Romantic Relationships: How Positional and Experienced Power Are Associated with Relationship Quality.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, vol. 38, no. 9, 17 May 2021, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02654075211017670.

Rooney, Sally. Normal People. Faber & Faber, 2018.

Isabel Emerson is a sophomore at UMass Amherst who is getting her undergraduate degree in Education. Alongside writing, she enjoys reading, spending time outdoors, and exercising.