Medea’s plan advances with the return of Jason at lines 866ff. She tells him that she has repented, come to her senses. She was wrong, she says (886–8):
I should have shared the planning, come to give my blessing at the marriage, yes, waited in attendance at your marriage bed, acted as a go-between to please you.
Medea here imagines herself playing the role of numpheutria (roughly ‘bridesmaid’), a role normally taken on by the mother or a relative of the bride, who is often depicted on vases as present in the marital bedchamber to encourage the bride and ensure that all goes well. For wife number one to play this role for wife number two represents an extreme and heavily ironic departure from the ritual norm, much like Clytemnestra’s welcoming of Cassandra as though she were the bridegroom’s mother in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.
Medea’s desire to pervert the course of Jason’s wedding is apparent also at the point at which she has the gifts brought out (950–8):
Bring me the bridal gifts to dress her in. She will enjoy this happiness not once, no, but ten thousand times. Not only has good fortune given her the best of men in you as husband, but she has inherited the bridal gifts that Helios, the Sun-God, father of my father, once bequeathed to his descendants.
(to Sons) Take the dowry in your hands. Take it. Give it to the princess, to the blessed bride. She will not think them insignificant, the wedding gifts she gets from me.
Medea’s wish that the bride should ‘enjoy this happiness not once … but ten thousand times’ is a perversion of a traditional speech-genre known as makarismos; the ‘blessed bride’ translates the adjective makaria. Medea is drawing on formulas of congratulation and praise; but her words imply the opposite. The word that she uses for ‘gifts’ in line 956 is phernai, a technical term for the bride’s trousseau, personal possessions which she would bring from her old home to her new home. So in one sense, Medea is now representing herself as the mother of the bride, sending the bride to her new house with prized heirlooms. But these items are Medea’s own heirlooms, handed down from her grandfather, Helios. There is a suggestion, perhaps, that Medea’s trousseau has become the new bride’s (just as Medea’s husband has become her husband); but this is a trousseau that will undo the wedding.
In the ode that follows, the Chorus imagine the bride wearing Medea’s gifts (978–89):
The bride-girl will accept the coronet of gold, and with it her own death-pangs and destruction. And on her glowing golden hair with her own hands she’ll place the wedding-veil of death.
The beauty of the shimmering dress, taboo in its perfection, the golden-twining coronet will so seduce her and she’ll hug them to her. And so she’ll wrap her body in her bridal shroud all ready for her marriage-rites with death. The snare gapes open for the final dance of death and she will fall, for there is no escape, poor girl, from her destruction.
The scene is precisely that of a wedding, but one that becomes a marriage of death. Earlier, Medea had contemplated such a marriage for herself, but she will now inflict it on Creon’s daughter.
The Tutor reports that the ‘bride, the princess, happily accepted the gifts from [the children’s] hands’ (1003–4). The Messenger then reports the whole story. The boys entered the palace and ‘went on through towards the bridal rooms’ (1137). On seeing them, the bride veils her face (translated as ‘the blood drained from her face’, 1147) – a gesture suggesting anger, but also alluding to an important performative element of the Athenian wedding. She then puts on the coronet and the robe, and is consumed by flames – she becomes the torch at her own wedding. Creon embraces her and is killed too (1156–220). Creon sticks to his daughter; they ‘wrestle’ (1214: ‘wrestling’ is a common Greek metaphor for sex). The perverted marriage is concluded by a consummation of sorts, the wrestling of father and daughter. ‘They’re lying there now in death together – an old father and his child’ (1220–1). A couple lie together: but father and daughter are now literally inseparable. The rite of passage from the father to the husband has not been completed.
Three households are thus destroyed: the one shared by Medea and Jason, that of Jason and his new bride, and Creon’s. Jason loses the children he has and any hope of children from his new wife. For the Athenians, the incorporation of a woman, an outsider, in a new household was a process that had to be delicately negotiated, in life and in ritual. In this play, that process goes spectacularly wrong.
Medea and the ‘ordinary woman’
The theme of marriage in Medea, then, is used, in a way typical of tragedy’s dramatization of myth, to highlight (indeed to take to extremes) the risks felt to be inherent in ordinary ritual processes and social institutions. Marriage is an experience of ordinary Athenian women, and, as we have seen, Medea’s status as an outsider and her ‘betrayal’ of her natal oikos represent the situation of the ordinary wife writ large. In this respect, Medea is both like and unlike the ‘ordinary woman’. This proves to be a theme that is also relevant in other ways.
The situation of ordinary women is most relevant in Medea’s first speech at lines 230–51:
Of everything that lives, all creatures sentient, we women are most abject of them all. We must first with an exchange of money buy a husband, pass control of our own bodies even to his hands. And still there is an ordeal still more bitter yet to come. For in this getting of a husband is the greatest lottery there is – will he be cruel or good? There are no ways a woman can divorce and keep her honour, and she can’t deny her husband. So she comes to a strange house, a whole new set of rules and expectations – and she needs to be clairvoyant for she’s not learned this at home: how best she should break in her husband. And if in this great undertaking we succeed, so that our husband lives contentedly and does not fight against the reins, our life is to be envied. But if we fail, we’re better dead. A man can leave the house and find some new distraction when he’s had enough, whenever he grows bored or irritated with the company at home. But for us, necessity demands that we have eyes for just one man, our husband. They speak about us, say how safe and sound our lives are in our homes, while they go out to fight. How little these men know. I’d rather stand my ground three times in battle, in the shield-line than endure the agonies of child-birth once.
This general disquisition on women’s lot in contemporary society, and the sense of injustice that it conveys, is at the very least a sign that these issues were ‘in the air’ in the 430s BC, that women themselves, at least, may have felt that they had grounds for complaint, and that men knew the kind of complaints women made or might make. We shall come back to this speech in a moment.
Women and song: ‘compensation for the female race’
The note of female rebellion that Medea sounds in the speech just quoted is taken up in the theme of women and song which punctuates the play. First the Nurse criticizes traditional (male) forms of song and poetry for their inability to assuage grief and soothe pain (190–204):
You would not be mistaken if you said our ancestors were feeble-minded, yes, not wise at all – they wrote their songs to sing at parties or at feasts or banquets, charming tunes to tease the ear, but no-one found a harmony, a gentle soft-stringed lullaby to soothe away the hates and miseries of men, the seeds of death and dreadful accident that cause whole households to come crashing down in total ruin. And yet to cure such evils as these are with music – what profit that would bring to all mankind. For when they’ve eaten well, when they’re replete, relaxed, what need have men for useless songs and taut-tuned melodies? The very feeling of repletion that a good meal brings is joy enough!
The Nurse’s complaint does not explicitly draw a contrast between men and women, yet there is nonetheless an indirect opposition of male and female concerns, first because the griefs that she has in mind are especially female, and because the context of song that she identifies is the symposion, the after-dinner drinking party from which respectable Athenian women were excluded. So already in this passage there is the beginning of a notion that me
n have had song to themselves for too long, and have not used it well.
This line of thought is carried forward in the first two stanzas of the first stasimon (410–30):
The well-springs of the sacred streams suck back their waters, and all the universe, all Justice is turned upside-down. The male brain breeds deceit, and all the solemn promises of gods are crumbling. So now’s the time that reputation too will turn and bring to womanhood, to me, respect and recognition. And so there’ll come some compensation for the female race.
The muses of dead dusty poets will cease their songs of woman’s infidelity. For the god of inspiration, Lord Apollo, never did bestow the power to write the lyre-song in a woman’s mind, else I would make reverberate a paean hymn against the whole male sex. The yawning years have much to say not just of men, but women too.
Male poets have been slandering women for their faithlessness, but now Jason has proved that it is men who are faithless, and the tide is going to turn; a women’s song will redress the balance. Inspired by Medea’s feminist rhetoric in the previous scene the Chorus sing (417–18) that there will ‘come some compensation for the female race’ – or, in the more traditional version, one that helps bring out the notions both of male-female competition and of the popular recognition of women’s worth, ‘honour is coming to the race of women’. The same theme recurs (albeit with considerably less optimism and confidence) in the Chorus’ chanted lines at 1081–9:
I’ve often been involved in softer sophistries [mythoi] and in debate more subtle than a woman should. But women have their muse of inspiration, too, which brings them understanding. Not all, perhaps, but there are some (how could there not be) and you’d find them out, I think, among the many. For womankind is not devoid of inspiration.
As the Nurse wished, they go on to sing (or, in this case, chant) of female concerns, the pain of bearing and raising children (1090–115).
The same old song
Some (for example, Bernard Knox) have argued that the song which redresses women’s wrongs and helps bring honour to the race of women is Medea itself. But this is unlikely. First, Medea’s feminist rhetoric in her opening speech is not to be taken in isolation from its context. Medea does indeed stand up for ordinary women in her words at lines 230–51 (quoted earlier), but she does so in order to get the Chorus on her side. Their very next song, in which they are enthused by Medea’s project of punishing Jason’s infidelity and see this as a way of striking a blow for all womankind, shows that she has been successful. Elsewhere in the play, when Medea appropriates the model of the ‘ordinary woman’, she does so for her own, manipulative, insincere ends – as when she presents herself as too weak to harm Creon (307–8, 314–15), and especially in her second scene with Jason, when she feigns repentance over her earlier and typically feminine ‘foolishness’, affirms her ‘respect’ for Jason’s masculine intelligence (872–93), and uses her genuine tears at the prospect of losing her children to add plausibility to her assumption of the passive, subordinate, and weakly emotional woman’s role (902–5, 925, 927–8, 930–1).
But Medea is no ordinary woman. She is a non-Greek, from the faraway, eastern kingdom of Colchis. Her grandfather is the god, Helios. She is a sorceress (395–7, 789, 806). Out of love for Jason, she has killed not only Pelias, Jason’s enemy (9, 486–7, 504, 734), but her own brother (167, 1334–5). Throughout the play (as interpreters never fail to point out) she appropriates and magnifies male, heroic values, demanding violent revenge when insulted and regarding it as unbearable to be mocked by her enemies. Medea follows her general reflections on women’s position in society with these words (252–8):
But the situation’s not the same for you and me. You have your city here, your fathers’ homes. You have life’s luxuries, companionship and friends. But I have no-one. I have no city and my husband treats me shamefully. He took me from my home as plunder to a strange land and, in the face of all I’m suffering, I can’t weigh anchor and sail safe home to my mother or my brother or my family.
Jason did treat Medea shamefully – as we saw, all those who express an opinion, not only Medea’s supporters, but also the impartial Aegeus, agree on this. But the reason why Medea cannot return to her father’s house, as an ordinary woman might do on divorce, is that she betrayed her father to his enemy. That betrayal included the murder of her brother, the devastation of her father’s hopes for the continuation of his family line. Medea has just lamented this fact in lines 166–7 (‘My father and my city! It was so shamefully I slunk from you, my brother’s murderess!’). The situation is indeed not the same for Medea as it is for the women of the Chorus. This conclusion is there for an audience, and especially for a predominantly male Athenian audience, to draw, when, having secured the Chorus’s support by playing on their sense of female solidarity, Medea makes it clear that their silence is one of the instruments she requires if she is to implement a plan of vengeance (259–63).
Yet precisely in her difference from the ordinary woman, Medea is, in a sense, a type of womanhood: she takes to extremes characteristics traditionally seen as feminine. She is every Athenian’s worst nightmare of what a woman might be and might do. Thus even in her attempt to present herself to the Chorus as an ordinary woman there is an element of stereotyping (the common prejudice of women’s allegedly typical use of dolos, guile, to get their way). The guile that Medea uses in getting the Chorus on her side will serve her well in the encounter with Creon that follows, her manipulation of Aegeus and Jason, and ultimately in the murder of Creon and his daughter.
It is striking that Medea ends her great speech to the Chorus with the following words (263–6):
For in all else, a woman is consumed by fear, no mettle when it comes to facing force or steel. But when she has been slighted in her marriage and her sex, there is no force more murderous.
We should compare this perspective with the famous lines, often quoted out of context, that conclude the purely general part of her speech (248–51):
They speak about us, say how safe and sound our lives are in our homes, while they go out to fight. How little these men know. I’d rather stand my ground three times in battle, in the shield-line, than endure the agonies of child-birth once.
If those lines emphasize women’s physical courage and a strength of character that is vastly underestimated by men, lines 263–6 return to the stereotype of their weakness as warriors. Perhaps, one might say, the later passage is ironic or sarcastic. But in fact both passages construct female lives, female emotions, and female courage from male perspectives. Childbirth is no doubt excruciatingly painful; it is only very recently that the real risk of death that it carries has, at least in some societies, receded into the background. But the attitude of women to childbirth as an experience is surely very different from that of men to the prospect of killing or being killed in battle. If these lines pay a tribute to women’s courage, they do so from a male point of view.
Also stereotypical is Medea’s emphasis on sex, especially on the intensity of women’s sexual jealousy. Ultimately, it is for sex that Medea betrays her father, kills her brother, kills Pelias, kills Creon and his daughter, and kills her own children. She herself laments the power of erôs (‘The lusts of men are such a crushing evil’, 330; the Greek brotoi here refers not only to males, but to all human beings); the Chorus sing that she ‘sailed out from [her] father’s home, [her] heart mad, mind irrational’ (432–4); Jason several times accuses her of being motivated by nothing but sexual passion (526–31, 549–73, 913, 1338). And in this he appears to be correct: this view is endorsed by the Chorus (‘A woman’s sexuality can bring many pains; it has already reaped its swathe of suffering for men’, 1290–2) and by Medea herself – Jason could not ‘humiliate her bed’ and get away with it (1354). Compare lines 1367–9:
Jason And so you thought your jealousies could justify such slaughter? [Literally: ‘So you thought it right to kill them for the sake of sex?’]
Medea Do you think that a wo
man cares so little for a husband’s infidelity? [Literally: ‘Do you think this is a small hurt for a woman?’]
Jason A woman who is rational would, yes! [Literally: ‘For a modest (sôphrôn) woman, yes.’] For you, though, everything that’s done you think is done to hurt you.
Modesty, sôphrosynê (also sometimes translated as ‘self-control’), is the woman’s virtue par excellence, precisely because of the alleged danger of women’s giving in to excessive appetites, especially erôs. Medea thus embodies – and exults in – the stereotype of the ‘bad’, insatiable woman. Medea’s anger (conventionally a feminine as well as a barbarian trait), and especially her failure (despite her attempts, in her monologue at 1040–80) to overcome passion with reason, speak to the same deficiency. We might contrast the Chorus (much closer to an approximation of the ordinary woman than Medea herself, despite her great speech) who pray (in the second stasimon, 627–44) that sôphrosynê should enfold them, that they might be spared the ravages of excessive erôs:
When Lust comes, swooping down too heavily on men, it saps good reputation, saps morality. Yet if Desire, if Aphrodite, comes with due propriety, there is no other god more gratifying. And so I pray you, mistress, lady, never turn your golden bow on me and launch at me your arrows, inescapable, smeared with the poisoned balm of longing, no, but rather let chaste modesty [sôphrosynê] enfold me, which is, of all the gifts the gods bestow, most beautiful. I would that Aphrodite, that Desire, in all her awesome terrifying power, does not unleash on me contentious argument or strife, whose appetite knows no abatement. May she not craze my very soul with longing for another’s bed, but rather, with unerring mind, may she preside in equitable judgement over all the marriages of womankind, honouring those women’s beds where harmony prevails.
Looking at Medea Page 18