Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(76)

It is important to note that at no point in Euripides’ play is Medea anything other than sane. The decisions she makes might horrify us, but she makes them after long, reasoned deliberations. I emphasize this because it is so rare to see a contemporary production of Medea which does not make her mad in the final scene. It’s a completely understandable choice: modern audiences might well struggle with the idea that Medea can slaughter her children, causing herself a lifetime’s worth of grief in the process, and do so without being insane. We want to believe that someone could commit such a catastrophic crime only if she is out of her mind. An additional problem is the deus ex machina that so troubled Aristotle. How do you convey to a modern theatre audience all the symbolism inherent in this? That Medea has somehow morphed during the play from an abandoned wife, face down on the ground, howling over her treacherous husband, to an immortal or almost-immortal figure? That the act of killing her children has not broken her, as we would expect, but made her more powerful than ever? There is a gendered element in this disbelief, of course: cinema audiences had no problem believing that Keyser S?ze became his most terrifying form when he decided to kill his family rather than allow himself to be threatened with their loss, in The Usual Suspects. The temptation is to roll the (to our eyes) oddity of the chariot appearance into our expectations of madness as a prerequisite for a woman to kill her children, so that the final scene is a destroyed woman hurling futile abuse at her ex-husband. But for Euripides – and for ancient artists – Medea is far from that.

There is a magnificent calyx-krater (a large wine-mixing bowl) from Lucania in southern Italy, which depicts the scene of Medea escaping Corinth in her chariot.44 This piece was made around 400 BCE, just thirty years after Euripides’ play was performed in Athens. This version of the scene has the children’s bodies left behind on an altar, being mourned by a white-haired older woman, presumably the nurse. Jason appears to the left of the scene: he is just arriving to discover that his sons are dead. In front of him is a small, skipping dog. And flying above the scene in a chariot pulled by glorious coiled yellow serpents is Medea. Her ornate dress, and headdress, remind us that this is a barbarian woman. But she looks every inch a goddess as she flies stony-faced through the air. Her chariot is surrounded by a huge nimbus, reminding us of its divine origin (which explains how it can fly, given the snakes don’t have wings). In perhaps one of the greatest digital curatorial comments in any museum in the world, the Cleveland Museum of Art website used to list the description of the pot – ‘Here Medea flees the scene after murdering her children on a flying serpent-pulled chariot’ – under the heading, ‘Fun Fact’.45 I salute this curator.

Much as it may pain our sense of justice, Medea really does get away with murder. She leaves Corinth for Athens, just as she had planned to when Aegeus arrived during the play. In some versions of their story, she is present in Athens to act against Theseus when he arrives to find his father, Aegeus (although, for Apollonius in the Argonautica, Theseus and Ariadne’s relationship predates Jason and Medea’s). In many versions of Medea’s story, she has children who survive: Pausanias lists several alternative names,46 and Herodotus also thinks she has a son who survives.47 Diodorus Siculus tells us that these inconsistencies are the fault of tragedians: the problem is they like things to be marvellous48 or miraculous.

Medea has long been used as a frame to describe women who exhibit violence against their offspring, no matter how appropriate the comparison might be. There is even an opposing theory to the Gaia thesis: that instead of a Mother Earth which nourishes and cherishes us, we instead inhabit a planet determined to extinguish us. It is called the Medea Hypothesis.

Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, has been considered a Medea narrative, because it tells the story of a woman who kills her own daughter. I am more sympathetic to Medea than most, but even I wouldn’t suggest she has anything like the same justification for killing her sons as a woman trying to prevent her child being taken back into a life of slavery. Margaret Garner, on whose story Morrison’s novel was based, was described as ‘The Modern Medea’ in Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s 1867 painting of her, held by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.49 If we take Medea at her word when she says it is better to kill her children herself than have them killed by a hostile hand, then perhaps we can justify the connection. But Medea spends a great deal of Euripides’ play saying that she will kill her children to take revenge on those who have scorned her and believe they have done so with impunity. She exterminates Jason’s line: no children to keep him company in his old age, and no great likelihood of remarriage; who would agree to marry Jason after she heard what had happened to Glauce? This is a far cry from a woman making a desperate choice – as Garner did – to save her child from the horror of a life in slavery, at the cost of the life itself.

Medea’s story is unusual because it maps so easily onto contemporary lives: most of us don’t know what it’s like to accidentally kill our fathers and marry our mothers, but most of us do know what it is like to feel abandoned and betrayed. Even if our response is – hopefully – somewhat more measured than Medea’s. A story that could easily seem so alien – giant snakes, magic, boiling people in pots – is made so human by Euripides that it is still performed all over the world. The visionary Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa staged an all-male production which played in cities across Japan for twenty years. His stated goal50 was to show Japanese women that they could be as strong and straightforward as Medea. And though she is far from straightforward to the characters within the play, she is straightforward to us, the audience. We always know what she is thinking, feeling and planning, because she tells us. She is a complex character with multiple internal forces pulling her in different directions, but that is why she seems so real, so human. Unlike the externalized forces of divinely wrought desire which afflict Phaedra, or the cruelties of fate which condemn Jocasta, Medea is ravaged by her own psyche. For all her witchy powers, she is a woman in crisis, lashing out at those who have hurt her.