Looking at Medea

by David Stuttard

  Ethnic and racial resistance are often more or less commensurate, as in racially divided South Africa, with class identity, and it is the threat of class warfare that is the final way in which I want to suggest that Medea’s divinity has been allegorized in recent decades. In Latin America, for example, Medea’s religion has been a symbol of the suppressed African origins and identity of a large proportion of the population, whose ancestors arrived as slaves in South America centuries ago. A play by Chico Buarque de Hollanda and Paolo Pontes (1985), entitled Gota d’Água (Drop of Water), relocated the story of Medea to Brazil, and involved the Afro-Brazilian spiritist religions, that date from the arrival of African slaves to Brazil in the sixteenth century. They ultimately derive from Yoruba, the West African religion, but have syncretically assimilated Amerindian and Roman Catholic elements. The most significant one, and the one in which their Medea figure is an expert, is called Umbanda. Since the 1930s, Umbanda’s adherents have been closely identified with the poor urban working class and underclass in Brazil. They worship a range of spirits (orixás) intermittently identified with Christian saints – Ogum, for example, is St George.19 The Umbanda religion uses much magical discourse and many spells. The play Gota d’Água pits Creonte’s atheist, sceptical, capitalistic rhetoric against the Medea figure’s magical language, and she wins. He is scornful of her religion and it thus becomes a crucial factor. But the reason is not that the playwrights are believers – more that the magic becomes a metaphor for potential ethnic and class resistance.

  The Brazilian version of Medea devised by de Hollanda and Pontes is one where Medea’s ancient religion represents the anger and potential revenge of people oppressed not only by institutionalized racism, that goes back centuries, but by their abject position in the economic and social systems. It is not the spirits of Umbanda who unleash their terrible violence, through the superhuman Medea, but the wrath of people humiliated and kept in poverty. The transmission of this kind of interpretation all over the planet, to Africa, India and Australia as well as Brazil, is partly a result of the influential film Medea of 1969, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Maria Callas. This film uses Medea’s religion in a fascinating way, implying that the sacrifice of the children is an ancient practice endorsed according to her own culture in cases of desertion by a husband. Pasolini is certainly influenced here by anti-colonialism and its defence of the rights of all peoples to religious self-determination. But it is even more important that he himself saw the religion in Medea as a symbol of what was fundamentally a political issue: he saw no difference, he said, between the fundamental Marxist argument underlying his film The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) and his Medea:

  In reality a director always makes the same film, at least for a long period of his life, just as a poet always writes the same poem. These are variations, even profound ones, on a single theme. And the theme, as always in my films, is a type of ideal and ever unresolved relationship between the poor and the common world, let’s say the sub-proletariat, and the educated, middle-class, historical world. This time I have dealt directly and explicitly with this theme. Medea is the heroine of a sub-proletarian world, an archaic and religious world. Jason is instead the hero of a rational, lay, modern world. And their love represents the conflict between these two hemispheres. It’s an old polemic of mine: the centre of the petit bourgeois civilisation is reason, while everything that is irrational, for example art, challenges bourgeois reason.20

  Medea worships, and in some ways actually is herself representative of, the ‘archaic’ and ‘religious’ gods, that are also the ‘sub-proletariat’. Jason represents the ‘reason’, on which the bourgeois ruling class pride themselves, and with which they have dominated the world. These two groups are in perpetual conflict. Here Medea becomes not only the force that can challenge the ruling class, but a metaphor herself for Art, the ‘irrational’ medium, which can nevertheless challenge the bourgeoisie’s hegemony.

  What a long way we have come from the bafflement of the women in Euripides’ play, when they realise that Medea is somehow working the will of heaven! The blinding, elemental force of the Euripidean Medea, aloft in her fiery chariot, was, for believers in Olympian religion, a symbol of the terrible things that Fate can deal out to humans who have broken any of the fundamental taboos. In later eras, Medea’s existential status as a quasi-god or demi-god has usually been replaced: her strength has sometimes been interpreted as the workings of a character suffering from psychosis, but equally often as a social or political force – the anger of oppressed women, ethnic groups and social underclasses. But, when we approach Euripides’ play, it always needs to be remembered, that it is the awesome, unknowable religious element, the metaphysical power embodied in the mysterious figure of Medea, which ultimately underlies all these interpretations.21

  Notes

  1 Buxton (1988) 41–51.

  2 For discussions of some of them, see Hall, Macintosh and Taplin (2000), Rubino (2000), Bätzner, Dreyer and Fischer-Lichte (2010), Biglieri (2005), Lorenzi (2008), Eichelmann (2010), Yixu (2009), Adriani (2006), Nissim and Preda (2006), Behrendt (2007). Unusual adaptations of Medea are discussed in several of the essays in both Hall, Macintosh and Wrigley (2004), and Hall and Harrop (2010).

  3 Hall (2010b) Ch. 4.

  4 Kovacs (1993) 45–70.

  5 Baumbach (2004); Johnston (1997) 44–70.

  6 See the speech Against Aristogeiton, attributed to Demosthenes (25.79–80), and Collins (2001) 477–93.

  7 Burkert (1987) 175.

  8 Protagoras Fragment 1 Diels-Kranz.

  9 See Hall, Macintosh and Taplin (2000); Hall and Macintosh (2005) Ch. 14.

  10 See Hall (1999) 42–77.

  11 Murray (1913) 32.

  12 Murray (1906) 94.

  13 Pankhurst (1931) 225–6.

  14 See Layton (1992) 195–213.

  15 See Macintosh (2005) 65–77.

  16 See Belli (1967) 226–39.

  17 Well analysed by Yvonne Banning (1999) 42–8.

  18 See the review of this production by Betine Van Zyl Smit, available online at www.didaskalia.net/issues/vol1no5/vanzyl.html.

  19 See DiPuccio (1990) 1–10.

  20 See www.filmfestival.gr/tributes/2003-2004/cinemythology/uk/film36.html, a translation of passages from Pasolini’s Le regole di un’illusione (Rome, 1991).

  21 A shorter and rather different version of part of this article, with less emphasis on the ancient religious and cultic elements, was first delivered as a lecture in Berlin at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in 2009, and published in German as ‘Medea als Mysterium im Global Village’ in Bätzner, Dreyer and Fischer-Lichte (2010). I am very grateful for helpful suggestions made at that time by Bernd Seidensticker and Erika Fischer-Lichte.

  12

  Black Medeas

  Betine Van Zyl Smit

  Euripides’ Medea is one of the ancient Greek tragedies which has been produced and adapted most often in the modern world. The reasons for the widespread and continued interest in this play must lie in the complexity of the character of the protagonist, which allows different aspects of her persona to be brought to the fore according to the period and place of the production and the intention of the producer or author. The mythical Medea is a helper-maiden, passionate lover, loving parent, enchantress/witch, abandoned wife, foreigner/outsider and infanticidal mother. All of these aspects have been elaborated in different treatments of the Medea myth since Euripides’ Medea was produced at the Great Dionysia in Athens in March, 431 BC. Such was the impact of this brilliant dramatization that it underlies all later adaptations of the myth.

  Medea is a woman who has given up her country because of her love for Jason, the Greek hero. She is a mother who loves her children. She has the courage of a male hero and stands up for herself when she is wronged. She is an outsider in Greece, but has won the friendship of Greek women. All these aspects make her believable as a human character in spite of her magic powers. It is prec
isely because she is credible as a wife and mother that the form of her revenge is so shocking. Yet, although she has supernatural powers, she cannot win back her husband, Jason, and she is a foreigner, who is politically at the mercy of powerful men. In an attempt to explain the heinousness of Medea’s revenge, her murder of her own children, Euripides’ Jason ascribes her act to her sexual jealousy and also to her belonging to a different culture. She is not a Greek. A Greek woman would never commit such an act. That Medea is a barbarian must be a factor.

  In the modern world Medea’s revenge has been interpreted in a far more sympathetic light. Feminist readings of Medea since the early twentieth century see her action as the result of abuse and domination by men. Coupled with an understanding of Medea’s plight as a woman, some authors have developed the themes of exploitation to include her cultural background, so that the heroine is not only of a different, and inferior, culture, but of a different and despised race. Basing their interpretation of the treatment of Medea on modern attitudes to people of a different race, many dramatists depicted her not only as non-Greek, but as non-white. This is achieved by transferring the action of the play to a world where the Greeks become representatives of the first world and Medea, the barbarian, epitomizes the oppressed and colonized, usually a darker-skinned race.

  One of the earliest dramatic treatments of the myth in which race is an important factor is the Medea of the German author and dramatist, Hans Henny Jahnn, first produced in 1926. Jahnn was deliberately addressing the racist attitudes of his contemporaries. He explained the reasons for his decision to adapt the tragedy so radically:

  What barbarians represented for the Greeks, Negroes, Malays and Chinese are for us modern Europeans. One of the most shameless traits of Europeans is the lack of respect for individual representatives of non-white races. I could make the whole of the marriage problem of Medea and Jason clear only by bringing the woman on stage as a negress.

  Jahnn’s Medea is an old and ugly black woman, while Jason, through Medea’s magic, has been ‘blessed’ with everlasting youth and beauty. Medea singles out ‘negress’ and ‘barbarian’ as two of the terms with which Jason reviles her. In addition to injecting the strong racial element into the tragedy, Jahnn also heightens sexual tensions by increasing the age of the sons so that one of them becomes a rival for the hand of Creon’s daughter. Creon himself hates foreigners and is a rabid racist. He rules out the marriage of his daughter to a ‘half-negro’ and lauds Jason as the most handsome, pure Greek, hero. Creon’s contempt for people of dark skin is so intense that he regards them as lower than animals. He explicitly threatens Medea that if she and her sons do not leave, they, as negroes and barbarians, will be killed like wild beasts.

  Jahnn’s reimagining of the Medea myth scandalized his contemporaries and was not a success in production. The play was, however, more successfully produced several times in post-war Germany. In his prose writings Jahnn made it clear that he saw the acceptance of the mingling of the races as fundamental for the peaceful coexistence of humanity in the modern world. That the sons of Jason and Medea are killed thus takes on a pessimistic dimension and implies the difficulty of realizing this ideal of racial harmony. Critics have interpreted Jahnn’s subtext as suggesting that the Black or African Medea is also a representative of non-Aryans in the Germany of his time, in other words, Jews and gypsies. In this reading, Jahnn’s Medea can thus be seen as a prophetic text warning of the dangers implicit in the application of the ruler’s (Creon’s) policy of racial purity and the catastrophic consequences it could have.

  Many other modern dramatic versions of the Medea myth present the adventure of Jason and Medea as a fable about colonialism and imperialism, in which colour prejudice and cultural conflict play a considerable role. This chapter will discuss the ‘Black’ Medeas of Henri Lenormand’s Asie (1931), Maxwell Anderson’s The Wingless Victory (1936), Jean Anouilh’s Médée (1946), Jim Magnuson’s African Medea (1968) and Guy Butler’s Demea (1990). Some of these playwrights have chosen to transpose the Greek drama to a new cultural environment in order to make the message to their audience more explicit. Thus the remoteness of ancient Greece makes way for the worlds more familiar to the French, American and South African audiences respectively of Lenormand, Anderson and Butler. This process inevitably entails certain problems. By changing the title of the play and the names of the characters, the three dramatists were constrained to delineate new backgrounds for their plays. Anouilh and Magnuson, on the other hand, by preserving the names of Medea and Jason, immediately linked their plays to the rich mythical tradition of the Medea legend. Its various elements become the background of their plays and they are able to select and alter aspects of the story to suit their themes and characterization.

  Henri Lenormand’s Asie was first produced in Paris in 1931 at a time when many French playwrights, such as Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux and André Gide, were reworking Greek tragedies and myths to engage with contemporary problems. Lenormand transferred the action of the play to the French colonial world in the period following the First World War. He preserved the traditional core roles under new names. The Medea role is assumed by an Asian princess, Katha Naham Moun, who has an Ayah as a confidante and child minder. The roles of Creon and his daughter are taken by a French colonial administrator, de Listrac, and his daughter Aimée, while Jason is transformed into an adventurer-turned-entrepreneur, called de Mezzana. The parts of the children are expanded while the action takes place over a number of weeks in different locations.

  At the start of the play, de Mezzana, who has married the princess of the kingdom of Sibang, is on his way back to France. On board the same ship are de Listrac and his daughter. There is much emphasis on how out of place Katha Naham Moun is in the French world. Her spoken French is atrocious and she chews betel nuts. The conflict between her world and Europe is concentrated in the position of the children who have been renamed by the Christian missionaries at the school they attended. The struggle for the souls of the children is represented on de Mezzana’s side also by his enthusiasm for technology, while the princess prefers that they should believe in the primitive forces of demons. The future of the children thus encapsulates the future of the relationship between France and Asia. On the one side is European civilization, Christianity, technological progress and exploitation of overseas possessions, and on the other the way of life and beliefs of the indigenous peoples. Similarly the two women, Aimée and Katha Naham Moun, represent these opposing poles. As they approach France, de Mezzana sees the attractions of having a wife who is part of this civilized world.

  The decision that de Mezzana is to marry Aimée and that the princess is to be repatriated is facilitated by de Listrac’s new position as Prefect of Marseille. He thus holds power over the rights to domicile of foreigners, in effect the Creon role. The outline follows that of the ancient tragedy, but with new elements in the characterization derived from the new environment. Thus de Mezzana becomes overtly racist. He wants Katha Naham Moun to return to her country, where she will be happier with a man of her race. He is now marrying a woman of his race. He will atone for his past mistake by devoting himself to bringing up his mixed-race sons in the best and most modern way possible, according to civilized standards. Lenormand made some changes to the plot required for verisimilitude in the European world. Thus Aimée and her father are not killed. The killing of the children is depicted in a very different way. The princess’ motives are not only revenge for her treatment, but have the positive aim of saving them from the racial prejudice they would suffer in France and preventing them from losing contact with the gods of their ancestors. The deaths are presented on stage as euthanasia. The children fall asleep and die in their sleep as they have been poisoned by mango jelly. Katha Naham Moun then opens the window to the rising sun and jumps to her death. The play ends as the Ayah looks after her mistress, not down to the earth where she lies, but up at the sky.

  This is clearly a far more sympathetic depictio
n of the Medea figure, but the conclusion of the play offers little faith in humanity. The representative of Asia has been crushed after having been exploited and then cast aside. The lives of the two boys who were the living product of a union between Asia and Europe have been extinguished. Lenormand chose to emphasize a particular aspect of the relationship between Medea and Jason. In the process Katha Naham Moun becomes more than a barbarian; she represents a whole continent of underdeveloped and scorned people. Conversely, it is the whole of France and the civilized world that must be held accountable for the injustice she suffers.

  The dominant theme of Asie of the dangers of racial intolerance is also that of an almost contemporary American adaptation of Euripides’ Medea. The play is again set in a new world, this time in a different period, and the characters have again been given names to fit in with their new environment. The Wingless Victory by the socially and politically engaged dramatist Maxwell Anderson was first staged in 1936. Anderson set his play in Salem, a town in New England, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The distance in time thus gave it some of the perspective lent by using myth. Salem was notorious as a result of the trials for witchcraft there in the late seventeenth century. It would also provide the setting for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, in which the witch-hunts provide parallels for the smelling out of communists in the McCarthy era of the 1950s.