‘Of all creatures that feel and think,
we women are the worst treated things alive’
So claims the eponymous heroine of Euripides’ tragedy, Medea. It really is no wonder she has become both a personification of men’s fears of empowered women and, more recently, a centralising figure for feminists. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let's start with a spooky story.
Once upon a time, there lived a princess called Medea. Her father was Aërtes, sorcerer-king of Colchis (modern-day Georgia), and her grandfather was Helios, the Titan god of the sun, who drove the sun across the sky every day in his blazing chariot.
The hero Jason, seeking the Greek crown that he is owed, comes to Colchis on a mission with his band of heroes, the Argonauts, named for their ship, the Argo. Jason is favoured by Hera, queen of the Olympians, so she entreats Aphrodite, goddess of love, to make Medea fall completely and hopelessly in love with Jason.
So, when Aërtes sets Jason 3 impossible tasks in order to claim the Golden Fleece and thus his crown… Medea helps him. Medea does most of the work. As they leave, with Colchis ransacked of its treasures (1. its fleece; 2. its princess), Aërtes gives chase. To ensure their escape, Medea kills her brother, Aërtes’ favourite child, and scatters his body in the ocean, so that Aërtes will have to stop to give him a proper burial.
She goes to her aunt Circe in Aiaia to be cleansed for this crime.
Back in Greece, and upon his rightful throne, Jason suddenly forgets that he owes his victory, his heroism, his crown to this woman, this foreigner. Regardless of the fact that she has bore him two children, he dissolves their common-law marriage and plans to marry a nice, local woman. Medea faces exile, and the choice between condemning her children to exile or leaving them to an equally uncertain future with their father.
She chooses vengeance.
She tricks her husband’s soon-to-be sisters-in-law into killing their father, and then — in the more salacious, and thus more famous, perhaps more canonical, version of the myth — she kills her children and flies away on a chariot summoned by her grandfather, the godly manifestation of the sun.
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| Lucanian Calyx-Krater, 'Medea in Chariot', c.400BCE |
Understandably, Medea has held the interest of authors for centuries. We can trace Medea's reception from Euripides, Seneca, and Ovid in the ancient world to Shakespeare and Spenser to contemporary feminist novels that retell Greek myths. As my late PhD supervisor Katherine Heavey writes in her monograph The Early Modern Medea (2015):
Described as “wild Medea” by Shakespeare and “Fell Medea” by Spenser, Medea is frequently identified as one of classical literature’s most abhorrent and uncontrolled heroines, by authors and commentators from the Middle Ages to the present day. She features importantly in the works of many canonical early modern authors, including Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, and in the work of their lesser-studied peers and successors […] Moreover, though she is most famous as the Euripidean and Senecean sorceress who killed her children after being rejected by Jason, Medea appears not only in Early Modern tragedy, or in English translations of classical works, but also in comic and political writing, and in prose and verse, as well as drama.
What these authors found interesting about Medea was, first, her power over men and, second, the way in which they could rewrite her story to differentiate the early modern Medea from her classical and medieval incarnations, simultaneously demonstrating their own affinity with the classics and their ability to make a well known figure like Medea somehow original, both entertaining and newly relevant to early modern readers and audiences. (Heavey 2015: 2)
21st century retellings of Medea not only depart from this long tradition of "fell Medea", but challenge it, using what I call radical empathy, revisiting her crimes with the understanding that she had little agency and no legal recourse to get justice another way.
It is the same approach taken with modern retellings of Clytemnestra.
One book that demonstrates this approach of radical empathy for Medea, as well as Phaedra (another villainous woman of Greek myth) is The Heroines by Laura Shepperson, which was one of the books in The Shelbiad Summer Book Club in 2023.
Not to worry, though! There are plenty more books that seek to excavate and exonerate Medea, or otherwise use Medea to tell the stories of other women wronged by powerful men.
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
In Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Medea’s story is used to narrate the trauma of hurricane Katrina and the wealth disparity in the modern day United States. There are multitudinous Medeas in the novel. One of them is the protagonist Esch, who identifies with Medea as she contends with the events of the novel. As Stevens writes in the International Journal of the Classical Tradition:
[Esch] feels a strong connection to Medea which deepens as the novel goes on and she rereads Hamilton, comparing aspects of her own experience to certain events in the “ancient tale.” In particular Esch’s identification with Medea is a way of understanding her own experience as a young woman coming of age, entering motherhood and confronting the responsibilities it entails, and more generally responding to forces–in her body, in her community, and in nature–that are beyond her control but nonetheless let her show an impressive power. (2016)
Specifically, Esch compares her unrequited love for Manny
with Medea’s feelings for Jason. She further becomes Medea when Manny realises
that she is pregnant with his child and rejects her: ‘Manny saw me, and […] he
turned away from me, from what I carry,’ (127). She finds empowerment in
the comparison – ‘I imagine myself tall as Medea,’ (147) – and escapes
from her dire situation by reading Hamilton’s Mythology.
Because of her mother’s death, Ward has asserted that Esch doesn’t have ordinary models for motherhood in her life, she begins looking to Greek mythology and to the dog, China, and to the natural world for her cues (Eveld 2012).
Perhaps a more convincing Medea in Salvage the Bones is China. China is a pit-bull, a champion fighting dog in illegal rings, and a more savage model of Medean motherhood. The other dog-fighters make the same mistake as Jason and his contemporaries, by assuming that motherhood has calmed the bitch, that it ‘Take a lot out of an animal to nurse and nurture like that. Price of being female.’ (84), but she ‘make[s] them know’ (as Skeetah, Esch’s brother, China’s owner, her – more loyal – Jason, tells her) by killing her puppy and beating the puppies’ father in a visceral fight for them.
There is one more Medea in Salvage the Bones: Hurricane
Katrina.
Katrina ‘treat[s] the land and its inhabitants as a mother might her children. There is violence indeed, including physical and psychological damage,’ (Stevens 2016)
‘the sound of the wind and the rain relentlessly [bear] down on the house’ comes when ‘Jason has remarried, and Medea is ailing’ (Ward 2011: 193).
As Ward has said, ‘Medea is in Hurricane Katrina because her power to unmake worlds, to manipulate the elements, closely aligns with the storm.’ (Hoover 2011: np.).
Esch is looking for a mother, a mother to teach her how to be a mother, and when China’s motherhood is too monstrous, she turns to the storm. When she is nearly carried away by the hurricane, she asks ‘Who will deliver me? And the hurricane replies sssssssshhhhhhhh’ (202). After the storm, Esch resolves to tell her child that ‘Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.’ (218).
Kalynn Bayron, This Poison Heart & This Wicked Fate
When I tell you that Kalynn Bayron is one of my favourite authors right now, I mean it with everything I have. She writes YA retellings of fairy tales (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty), classic literature (Frankenstein), and, of course, Greek myths.
I don't want to give too much away here, because I am urging you to read these books, but I do want to briefly comment on Greek myth retellings in YA literature. Kalynn Bayron’s duology, This Poison Heart (2021) and This Wicked Fate (2022), continue the trend of YA fantasy literature that uses Greek gods and mythology in their otherwise original plot and worldbuilding – as is also seen in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series (2005-2009), Alexandra Bracken’s Lore (2021).
In this retelling, again, we see a specifically Black American lineage for Medea. The protagonist, Briseis, is a modern “black girl magic” Poison Ivy, by which I mean she has a superhuman green thumb and is immune to poison, and her identity is specifically steeped in contemporary US Black culture, right down to the Hamilton musical sing-alongs.
It transpires that she is a descendant of Medea, who, in turn, is a descendant of Hecate, all of whom are described by their dark skin and African hair. The plot also involves the caucasian descendants of Jason, who seek to oppress and destroy the descendants of Medea, and covet their magical gifts.
In both Ward and Bayron's retellings, we see the "foreign" aspects of Medea's mythic characterisation exemplified to speak to current racial tensions in US culture. But these texts are not only following a mythic tradition of rewriting Medea to speak to racial and gendered otherness, but also an American literary tradition.
I am referring, of course, to...
Toni Morrison, Beloved
In this book (which I have promised myself I won't read for a third time, because it's just too heartbreaking), Sethe – Morrison’s Medea – kills her daughter, her Crawling Already? Baby, because she sees it as a fate preferable to slavery.
Beloved, the murdered child, haunts the house first in a spectral form then in a physical one, as part of the narrative of intergenerational trauma and continued race-based oppressions in the US.
Writing in 1983, Morrison uses ancient myth and not-so-ancient US history to
reinscribe the issue of race into US history, and draw a direct line from these
historical and mythical pasts to the racism of her present. The novel, it is
always worth remembering, is dedicated to the sixty million and more: the
estimated number of people who died during the Atlantic slave trade.
This book's relevance is, infuriatingly, on the rise, as seen in the increasing segregation in the US, as one example amongst many of the intensification of racism in the US right now.
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There is another Black American woman that we could talk about in relation to Medea. And that woman is … Beyonce.
The video for ‘Hold Up’ begins with Beyonce swimming through the drowned rooms of a neoclassical house, with the voiceover that includes the lines:
‘I tried to change… close my mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less awake… but still inside me, coiled deep, was the need to know: are you cheating on me?’
As she strides through the
streets in a yellow dress (a significant garment in ancient Greek tragedy),
smashing things with her baseball bat, singing ‘what’s worse, being jealous or
crazy?’ -- the message is clear: cheat
on her at your peril. Her revenge will be public and spectacular.
Maybe killing her children and flying off in a blazing chariot was just Medea Lemonade-ing.
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This might be the point at which you're wondering why I haven't mentioned Rosie Howlett's incredible novel, Medea. Sorry, darlings, you're just going to have to wait, because that one's getting it's own blog post.
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When we look at Medea apart from the prurience and pearl-clutching of the patriarchy, we find a very interesting figure for feminism.
Not least because she is at once innocent and active: while she is tricked and betrayed by Jason, she is no simple victim, and she takes an active role in both the Argonauts’ Saga and her own fate.
Moreover, there is space for an affective reading of her.
While I am not advocating for killing your children, it is an understandable route that she takes. For one, she has no legal recourse for custody: she can either be separated from her children (whereupon they might be abused by their stepmother) or she can condemn them to exile with her. She has no rights when it comes to Jason either, being a woman and a barbarian woman at that. And the children are, ultimately, Jason’s property. There was even a strand of belief in Ancient Greece that held that women weren’t even biologically related to their children, they were merely the incubators for the male seed!
And, something we always tend to forget is that she doesn’t take this decision lightly. She wails and begs and bargains and tries to look for any other path. But for her, a barbarian woman in an apparently civilised foreign land, she has no other choice. And I really see where she was coming from.
And what does she say just before she kills her children?
'I am a wretched woman.'
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| Frederick Sandys, Medea (1868) |
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