Tragic representations of female noncombatants' trauma after war expose the ripple effects of violence that wars create, even for individuals and communities distant from the fighting. At the same time, these characters' expressions of trauma also create a conflict of witnessing for other characters and the audience. By shifting focus to the returning hero's wife and the women he enslaves, Weiberg calls attention to the detrimental effects of structural and chronic forms of trauma in addition to trauma caused by discrete, catastrophic events.
Weiberg argues that recognizing women's trauma in these tragedies requires questioning how Greek society was organized through hierarchies that privilege the hero's story of trauma and recovery to the exclusion of other types of stories and experiences.