At the same time, the appearance of Medea above stage in Helios’ carriage squabbling with Jason below completes the reversal between victim and perpetrator that was begun with Jason’s arrival on the scene as a distraught father. It is now he, not Medea, who is shown as the suffering victim as he reels from the murder of their children and she sits aloft and unreachable with their corpses. Our sympathies shift accordingly.
The Choral statement at the end settles nothing. The same lines with an additional first line appear at the end of Alcestis, Andromache, and Helen. The assumption is that the lines have been added either by actors or book-editors. If they are genuine, they are so generic that they have little significance.11
Five hundred years later, the Roman writer Seneca wrote a very different Medea. This is not the place for a full discussion of his play or for a detailed comparison with Euripides’ treatment of the myth. A few salient points, however, may shed light on Euripides’ achievement. Most of the scenes in Seneca’s Medea have parallels to the Euripidean version and appear in similar order. But the dynamic and characterization are worlds apart and reflect totally different conceptualizations and purposes.
Seneca draws his Medea as the embodiment of evil and his Jason as an honourable and sensible man, who leaves his ‘untamed’ foreign wife for a virtuous Greek woman. In the very first scene, he shows Medea as an enraged and savage figure, not a grieving one. Without preamble, Seneca shows Medea working herself into a demonic and bloodthirsty frenzy, as she prays to the gods in their vicious and infernal aspects to help her accomplish a vengeance of extraordinary evil and brutality. She rages for over fifty-five lines before the Chorus raise their voices to sing in celebration of Jason’s upcoming marriage and divorce. Everything in the play justifies the Chorus’ view.
Seneca endows his Medea with a complex of qualities that make her the embodiment of evil. These include wildness and savagery; criminality, bestiality, and madness; and the sinister magical powers of a witch. These qualities are repeatedly referred to, separately and in combination: by Jason and the Chorus, the Nurse, and Medea herself, who revels in the bloody criminal acts she had committed to save Jason and the Argonauts (e.g. 563–4) and proudly terms her planned revenge ‘a crime’ (scelus, 1016).
These qualities are referred to throughout the play and dramatized in the fourth and fifth acts. The fourth act demonstrates her magical powers at length. Seneca first has the Nurse describe, in grisly detail, Medea preparing the poisonous potion, in which she will dip the robe for Creusa, Jason’s bride. Then he brings Medea on stage, so that the audience can watch her doing it. He shows her summoning the gods of death and shades from the otherworld (740) and then calling on Hecate (770), a goddess associated with magic and witchcraft. What Seneca seems to be saying is that a human mother would not kill her children. Only an evil witch would.
The fifth act not only shows Medea killing her children on stage, but taking sadistic pleasure in it. In his protracted presentation, Seneca shows Medea drawing a sword and killing one child first, then, interrupted by the arrival of Jason and his men, contemplating her deed and conversing with Jason before killing the second child. After her murder of the first child, we hear her triumphing in the return of her former power, acknowledging her pleasure in the boy’s murder, and, quite dreadfully, regretting that the murder was deficient in retributive power because Jason had not witnessed it with his own eyes (982–94)! To rectify the omission, she kills her second child in full view of her horrified husband, glorying in her crime and sadistically urging herself to ‘Relish a leisurely crime, anguish, do not hurry’ (1016–17)12 before pulling the sword.
Both Euripides’ and Seneca’s plays produce in the audience a sense of horror and revulsion at the extremity to which Medea brings her vengeance. Unlike its Euripidean model, however, Seneca’s play does not allow the audience to identify with Medea. From the very first, she is presented as being as different as possible from the good people of the audience, as ‘not us’. The audience was invited to observe her from a distance, as a barbaric foreigner and supernatural witch, with whom they had nothing in common. At one and the same time, they were thus allowed to enjoy the sensation of horror that her conduct evoked, and to judge and condemn her conduct as something totally outside their own ken. In contrast, by leading his audience to identify with Medea, Euripides’ more human and sympathetic depiction of her compelled them – and us – to acknowledge as their own the anger and violence, the desire to harm those who harm us, that we all possess.
Notes
1 Burnett (1998), xvi.
2 MacDowell (1978), 86–9.
3 Roisman (1999), 1–122.
4 Kovacs (1994).
5 Mastronarde (2002), 52–64.
6 Kovacs (1994).
7 Some editors regard these lines unauthentic; see Mastronarde (2002).
8 Kovacs (1994).
9 Burnett (1973), 14–15.
10 Cf. Burnett (1998), 221–4.
11 Mastronarde (2002).
12 Hine (2000).
10
Medea: Feminism or Misogyny?
Douglas Cairns
Marriage
Marital dysfunction looms large in Euripides’ Medea. The plot involves no fewer than five marriages that fail to achieve their proper outcome. Most obviously, there is the marriage of Medea and Jason. Then there is the one between Jason and Creon’s daughter. But we also hear about the marriages of Medea’s and Jason’s children that will not now take place (1025–36), as well as the one between Medea and Aegeus, alluded to at lines 1384–5 and present in the audience’s mind during the Aegeus scene, especially in the allusions to the conception of Theseus at Trozen (679–88) and in Medea’s (as it will turn out) unnecessary promise to end Aegeus’ childlessness (716–18). The audience know that Medea will become Theseus’ wicked stepmother, putting the continuation of yet another family line in danger. Here we shall concentrate on the two main marriages, those of Medea and Jason, and Jason and ‘Glauce’ (the daughter of Creon).
The marriage between Medea and Jason exhibits many of the regular features of an Athenian marriage, but in extreme form. Marriage in Athens was viri- or patrilocal: the husband brings a stranger into his or his father’s oikos (household). In this case, the stranger in question is an anomalous, clever barbarian sorceress. Medea thus dramatizes in a particularly striking way a more widespread Athenian sense of the bride as an intruder, a potential ‘enemy within’. Similarly, in the Athenian conception of marriage, in moving to a new oikos, the bride has to ‘betray’ her father, leaving behind the family she was born into (her ‘natal family’). Medea has done this in a spectacular way: she formed an arrangement with Jason on her own, without her father’s permission, eloped, and left her father’s house far behind. She can never return, especially because she murdered her brother in the course of her escape. In this, she is in a sense a mirror image of Sophocles’ Antigone. Where Antigone says that she would never have done what she did for a (replaceable) husband or child, but only for a brother (Antigone 905–15), and gives up the chance of marriage out of loyalty to her natal family, Medea chooses a husband at the cost of her brother’s life, and thus puts conjugal family before natal.
Medea’s marriage is dysfunctional from the outset. In lines 21–3 and 495–8 she claims that Jason has broken oaths or pledges solemnized by dexiôsis, the clasping of right hands, a ritualized gesture appropriate at the stage of betrothal (enguê). At Athens, however, enguê, sealed by dexiôsis, is not a contract between man and wife, but between the bride’s male guardian or kurios and the bridegroom. Medea has subverted this process from the start. After this inauspicious beginning, Medea has regrets. Again, this replicates a popular conception of the feelings of an ordinary Athenian wife, albeit – in Medea’s case – writ large. Medea repeatedly voices her regret at doing what all wives had to do, abandoning their natal family (166–7, 255–8, 328, 502–3, 800–1). She laments her own situation by picking up on a feature that i
s not unique to that situation, but common to all wives.
She makes these points, of course, only after the marriage has broken down. Her references to her father’s house and to her homeland make the point that her marriage has been problematic from the beginning and serve to underline her regret. But the fact that she cannot, unlike a wife in normal circumstances, return to her father’s oikos also stresses the enormity of Jason’s betrayal. And although their marriage was anomalous and problematic from the start, its ultimate breakdown is Jason’s responsibility. According to the Nurse in the prologue, Medea ‘bent her will to Jason’s’ in everything she did (13). This, she observes, is as it should be in a marriage. But (as the Nurse goes on to emphasize) Jason has betrayed Medea and formed a new marriage; and for this he is condemned throughout the play – not only by Medea, but also by the Nurse, the Tutor, the Chorus, and (most importantly) the impartial Athenian king, Aegeus (17–18, 82–4, 116, 157–8, 410–13, 439–40, 577–8, 690–707, 1231–2).
Thus Medea’s marriage with Jason and Jason’s marriage with Creon’s daughter overlap; the end of the one is the beginning of the other, and thus that beginning too is problematic and inauspicious. The extent of marital breakdown is emphasized by Medea’s early laments and by the sympathy of the Nurse and the Chorus, especially during the Chorus’ entrance song, in which they respond to the cries of Medea within the house (144–59):
Medea (Screaming) The fire from heaven’s shooting through my head! Why should I go on living? I wish that I could find some peace in death, some solace sloughing off this sordid hateful life!
Chorus Did you hear? O Zeus and earth and sunlight, did you hear the scream, so eerie, terrifying? Did you hear the poor lost bride? / O, Medea, in your madness, what lust is this for death’s cruel stony bed? She will hasten her own end, her death. / Don’t speak of that! If your own husband worshipped a new woman and her sex, you too would know what she is suffering. Don’t let it be a mortal wound! Zeus himself will join with you to bring you justice. No! Don’t grieve unnaturally, too much, don’t weep too much for him, your husband!
Medea wants to die, and the Chorus describe her wish as ‘lust’ ‘for death’s cruel stony bed’. This is the familiar tragic motif of the ‘marriage of death’: one marriage being ruined, Medea has a bride’s passion for a new marriage bed, in death. Medea is here explicitly a ‘poor lost bride’. In her next utterance, Medea uses the same Greek word (numphê) with reference to Jason’s new marriage (163–4):
I wish that I could see him and his bride and his whole house torn up by their roots, for daring so to wrong me in my innocence!
Jason is implicated in two marriages, with two brides. The result will be disaster in both cases.
The purpose (telos) of marriage in classical Athens was the production of children and the continuation of the oikos that this ensured. A formula of betrothal, ‘I give you this woman for the ploughing of legitimate children’, recurs in the comedies of Menander (e.g. Dyskolos/The Grouch 842–3). Medea’s marriage fails utterly to achieve its purpose: the children whose existence is its raison d’être are killed, and Jason’s oikos is wiped out. This is precisely Medea’s aim in punishing him (794–6):
And when I’ve turned all Jason’s life upon its head, I shall leave Corinth and so endure my exile as the killer of my children, whom I love more than the world, the perpetrator of a deed of all deeds most unholy.
Jason’s ‘life’ is, in the original Greek, his domos, his ‘house’; but not just in the physical sense. Jason’s household, old and new, is to be extinguished, precisely the opposite of the normal telos of marriage. Jason acknowledges Medea’s success: her murder of their children has left him ‘bereft, destroyed’ (1326). He goes on to comment on the fatal outcome of their marriage (1336–8):
You were my wife. You bore my sons. And now, because of nothing more than sexual jealousy, you’ve killed them.
Compare 1347–50:
All I have left now is to mourn the spirit of my own destruction – my bride, so young, so innocent, is there for me no longer, and my sons I brought up with such care – I’ll never speak to them or see them in this life again. All that I had is gone.
Jason will not even be permitted a role in his own sons’ burial (1377–81, 1410–14). And this is not all (1395–6):
Jason Yes, I shall go. My sons are lost forever.
Medea Your grief will grow as you grow old into great old age.
To the Athenian way of thinking, children should bury their parents, not the parents their children. Jason is denied even the opportunity to bury his sons, and, because Medea has destroyed his household, the contract between the generations – that parents care for children and children reciprocate by caring for aged parents, a contract that depends on and instantiates the continuity of the family – has broken down. Jason will have no one to care for him in old age, no one to see to his burial, no one to keep his memory alive as part of his family’s household cult. Marriage is supposed to ensure all these things; for Jason, Medea has made sure that it will not.
But this affects her too (1021–37):
Oh, my children! My children! This is your city and your home! When you no longer have your poor sad mother with you, you will stay here for all the rest of time without me. And I must go, a fugitive, an exile, to a strange land although I’ll never have my joy of you or see your happiness, I’ll never share your wedding day, never meet your bride or decorate the bridal chamber for you, never raise the blazing marriage torch in sacred ritual.
I cannot weaken, and therein lies my tragedy. It was for something different that I brought you up. It was for something different I went through all the work and all the grind, the twisting agonies of birth-pangs just to bring forth sons to die. I had such hopes: I would grow old and you’d be there for me, and when I died you’d fold the death-shroud round for me and I would be the envy of the world. But as it is, all my sweet dreams are turned to dust. You see, I shall be lonely and alone without you, and so I shall drag out my life in bitterness and pain.
Medea will not see her sons’ weddings, will not perform the tasks of preparing the bridal bed, of holding the torch as they bring home their brides. Bearing children was Medea’s purpose in life; those children were born to marry and have more children. In killing her own children, Medea negates the purpose of her marriage; thus ‘the twisting agonies of [her] birth-pangs’ were in vain. Not only, however, will the children fail to achieve the telos of marriage; Medea too will be without care in old age, will not, as would be normal, receive funeral rites from her own children. The failure of Medea’s marriage undoes all the sociocultural benefits that a successful marriage should bring.
The marriage of Jason to Creon’s daughter and especially its newness are a central theme throughout the play. In these references to the new marriage, the girl is regularly referred to as numphê, bride. We have to assume that the wedding took place very recently indeed – or in fact, since an Athenian wedding was a process that was drawn out over several days, perhaps we are supposed to imagine that the wedding is actually still in progress. This is suggested by several passages that we shall look at below.
However that may be, marriage ritual is central to the fate of Creon’s daughter. Medea’s initial thoughts of vengeance give us an early indication. Having received a day’s reprieve from Creon, she looks for ways of turning her three enemies – Creon, Jason, and Jason’s bride – to corpses (374–5). These are the three parties to the marriage as a transaction between two households: the father who gives the bride away, the bridegroom who receives her, and the bride herself. Among the options Medea contemplates are the following (378–80):
Perhaps I shall engulf their bridal home in fire or stalk in silence to their room, where they have spread their soft warm bedding, and so plunge a knife as sharp as any razor in their liver.
The methods of vengeance she considers are focused on marriage and pervert the process of marriage. The bride proceeds from her fat
her’s house to her new husband’s house by torchlight; the bridegroom’s mother awaits her arrival, torch in hand. The marriage will ultimately be consummated in the ‘soft warm bedding’ of the bridal chamber. The acts of torching the bridal chamber, or penetrating both partners with a sword, parody these normative features of the ritual. Medea’s intentions are summed up at 399–400:
I shall make their wedding-song a bitter song of lamentation, and their marriage desolate as my own exile.
She repeats the sentiment at the end of her set-piece debate (agôn) with Jason (625–6):
Go! Bed her! And maybe, if my words find favour with the gods, in marrying her you’ll lose all chance you ever had of marriage.
The original Greek here stresses the newness of the wedding and Jason’s current role as bridegroom. (‘Bed her!’ translates a verb that might be taken as something like ‘play the bridegroom’.) The Greek also makes explicit the conflation of wedding and funeral ritual: Jason will ‘celebrate a wedding of a sort that will produce lamentation’ (626); the wedding songs (as Medea makes clear also at 399–400) will turn to funeral laments.
Medea’s aim, then, is to turn Jason’s new marriage – a new beginning, something hopeful, to be celebrated, and potentially fruitful – into its opposite, something to be lamented, a perversion or travesty of itself. And this is precisely what she does (784–9):
I shall send my sons with wedding-gifts for the new bride – a gauzy dress, a coronet of gold, an intercession, as it were, to ward off banishment. And if she takes these pretty trifles, swathes her skin in them, then she and any who has contact with her will choke out their lives in twisting agony. Such is the venom I shall smear upon my gifts.
Gifts, then as now, are an important part of the wedding. Athenian vases depict them being sent along with the bride in the procession from her father’s to her new husband’s house; but there was also a custom of bringing gifts to the newly-weds’ house on the morning after their first night together. This is the stage of the wedding process that Medea’s gifts evoke. But the gifts themselves, the robe and the coronet, are also the kind of thing the bride might wear during the wedding itself.
Looking at Medea Page 17