Is ‘Medea’ a Feminist Text?

Reading the Classics

                                                       As for human life, it is a shadow…

Is Medea a Feminist Text?

                  Who would marry Medea? Who would write about her as if she were a normal woman?

The answer to the first question is ‘Probably nearly anyone’ – Medea wild with love and beautiful - and to the second, much the same.    A lot of student essayists write about this classic as if, in some respects at least, Medea were like any neighbour, any woman you might find just living down the street. In this version the play is seen as a feminist text, excoriating Jason and stressing the plight of women in a social culture where they are the inferior sex, and Euripides is seen as hoisting the flag for Feminism .

                   True, there is a great deal of talk about women’s status in the play, and Medea’s outrage is supported and empathized with.  Indeed, at one point when the Chorus is in full support, annexing her situation to their own, they predict a bright feminist future when

                                     the female sex is honoured. (414)

                   But they seem to have completely overlooked Medea’s own description a few lines    before, when she faces them with a vicious definition of what they, as a gender-group, have in common, gloating over their capacities for evil

                    We were born women – useless for honest purposes,

                   But in all kinds of evil skilled practitioners (408-9)

  whose patroness is not Hillary Clinton or Amal Clooney or Kamala Harrris, but Hecate, the dark divinity.

                    Here the Raven paused and considered the three women whose names he’d just nominated.

Be careful, laddie, he thought. Don’t push it. He probably wouldn’t let his girlfriend read this. Inviting the comparison is always a risky game, even if you are only hinting at the link between evil and female power, even if it’s only a sort of a joke…

                   He sighed. Would life be easier if there were no feminists in the world? Not really, it would be worse. But it might make daily negotiations with your Chosen One (and there’d even be an argument about that, about who chose who, if she happened to read this) a tad easier.

                   So, although there are elements to this play that are susceptible to a Feminist reading, he wrote, there’s something bigger and more frightening going on as the play sweeps by, a story that has its roots in actions and meanings that are deeper than those of daily reality and the ‘normal’ social world. For brief though it is – and maybe it’s brief because of the enormity of its vision- this is a play about the Irrational, the force that threatens human behaviour and civilization, that   batters at the planks of Reason and beats them down. And Medea is the personification of that force – the force, Tolstoi might argue, that lies behind War, or that produces a holocaust.

                   The triumph of Euripides is that he brings this home through the creating of believable characters – Jason and Medea are not just dramatic stooges of this theme. They are – and the Chorus and Choric figures like the Nurse and the Tutor help to make them this – completely believable as human characters. Jason, for instance, is so maddening as the man who sees all his actions as right that of course we see him as the typical male.  And Medea too is fantastically credible – furious, self-dramatising, foul-mouthed, sexually enraged, jealous and revengeful – she is presented as the stereotype of a woman wronged.

                   But over and beyond these character-based readings stands a vision of existence not nearly as governed by the gods (whose presence in this world is fairly thinly annotated) as that which we find in Sophocles – but rather swept by horrors of a nameless source. True, the gods are indicated – Hecate, Medea’s patroness, her ancestor who provides the chariot at the end, the tutelary gods of Athens that have endowed Hellas, the civilized kingdom, with its harmony and civilized grace. These references among others make up the play’s conventional litany of the deities who judge and endow human life. 

                    But in this play these gods are not the agents of our human fate, they do not force the wheel that drives destiny. They are oddly remote from the consciousness of the text, though conventional oaths are taken and sworn.

                    At the same time the play is not about human agency either. In fact it is oddly silent about questions of motive. Things, as we will see in a moment, have an accidental quality, neither determined by an inexorable pattern, as in Oedipus Rex, nor master-minded by the gods – and certainly not driven by the decisive actions of men.  Jason is hardly a tragic hero, the man whose extraordinary capacities and out-of-scale faults lead to the tragic fall. He’s a rather prosaic fellow, self-justifying, ordinary except for the events that envelop him. 

                   Let’s look closer and see if we can nail it:

This brief play is just over 1400 lines long, about the same as an average day of speaking and listening for most people for a day.  Say at 100 lines an hour for fourteen hours – that would clock up a play of this length. And it covers only one day, no one goes to sleep in it, nothing happens overnight, there’s no overnight, there’s no room for reflection or thought. One day, the day Medea retrieves from Creon, is enough to unleash all the terrors of the mortal world if you have Medea’s dreadful abilities.

                  There’s not much room in it for the discussion of motives; there’s certainly not enough time for any one to change, or to question themselves.  Quite a lot of time and speech is expended on the background story, the early history of Jason’s quest with much reiteration of events where human action takes place in a world of witchcraft and magical enemies, the fire-breathing bulls, the Serpent that kept watch over the Golden Fleece.  But this is not fantasyland; all these early events represent the real and current threat of the barbaric world, against which Hellas, the home of rational civilization, stands alone, lucid but fragile.  How will such a world, the Chorus asks, on hearing of Medea’s intention to find sanctuary in Athens, 

                    welcome…the child-killer

                   whose presence is pollution

 on its holy soil…unscorched by invasion

 where among the glories of knowledge their souls are pastured

                   This is the point made over and over again - that the East is barbarous, that Medea, coming from the blue Symplegades

                                     That hold the gate of the barbarous sea

is a barbarian. The sea that has given her passage to Hellas is barbarous, just as Asia is in its  entirety barbarian, the source of irrationality and savagery. So too the rage and savagery of  Medea’s   murderous heart is presented as the epitome of that whole realm.

                    (I brought you, says Jason at the end, as Medea arrives above the house in a chariot drawn by dragons, from your palace in a land of savages Into a Greek house. The implication – but there are translation issues here – may be that a Greek house, on a small scale though it might be, far outweighs in value any palace on the barbarian shore)

                    And it’s interesting that the reference to Asia is made immediately before Medea’s first entrance. For 200 lines we have heard her and heard about her inconsolable and terrifying fury. The Nurse has twice compared her to a wild or maddened bull(odd gender choice). The Chorus, for  whom this IS a Feminist issue at this point, speaks instead of a wife in her anguish. These are rather noticeable differences in scale. Which one applies? We are waiting to see – is her anguish such that she is made almost inhuman by it (Nurse’s terrors), or can we, as the Chorus wishes to do, approach her as a friend…anxious to do whatever (we) can, offering woman-to-woman support?

                    Anyway, neither the Nurse nor the Chorus – and therefore us in the audience- is at all prepared for Medea’s surprising first entrance:

                    She is not shaken with weeping, but cool and self-possessed.

                    What?? Why?? What is Euripides telling us here?  The contrast between what we’ve been witnessing, indirectly but unforgettably, and what we now see is very pointed. What does it mean?

                   I think the answer lies in something the Chorus has said immediately prior to Medea’s awaited appearance on stage. It’s another very subtle suggestion, but looking back at it now, a few dramatic instants later, very strong. It describes Medea’s journey from her homeland to the     civilized and lucid world of Greece, HELLAS. (How suggestive that name is, with its open vowels, its mellifluous ll and s sounds(*see note below) – like another word that onomatopoeically shows the Greeks’ love of the sea, THALASSA…THALASSA.  It is said that this is what Alexander the Great’s armies cried aloud after their long and difficult trek back home westward out of Afghanistan, brought them for the first time back into the Greek world of islands and the sea: EIDON THALASSA:  they cried. BEHOLD THE SEA

                  The same sort of feeling imbues what the Chorus says moments before Medea arrives  before us all, that she was drawn

                                     Across from Asia to Hellas, setting sail at night,

                                     Threading the salt strait…

                   There’s something insidious about this, something almost creepy, ‘threading’ the salt strait, something weblike, so very silent and hidden, this night journey, so lightly traced. 

“Normally” (is there a ‘normal’ when we are reading such texts?) we might not take much notice of this form of description – we might ‘simply’ assign it to dramatic conventions of verse in this classical genre. But Medea’s appearance is so startling that we are taken aback and start looking round for clues- and here, it seems, is one. That is, that what arrives on stage, so cool and self-possessed is something so dangerous in that very coolness, so subtle and insidious in its windings, that we ought to be very careful in dealing with it indeed. Which OF COURSE  Jason isn’t, so caught up as he is in complacent rationalizing of his actions.

                    What has arrived before us on stage is the Irrational, in short, not so much personified as  totally embodied in Medea. In her very nature she carries all the seeds of the ‘Asian’ world, its lack of civilization, its absoluteness, the despotism of its actions and intentions, what Zorba the Greek in Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel (1946) of the same title, calls (referring to marriage) the whole damn catastrophe.  Medea is the figure of walking Catastrophe. (Look up a Greek dictionary and work out the literal meaning of the word.  And also, note – see*above – that it is fine to dicsuss sound effects and onomatopoeia when you are talking about the originals of works in translation, but not when you are discussing the effects IN translation, i.e. in the English versions).

So this, so far, is what we have:  first, a terrifying sense of what can come towards us out of the Barbaric world. And here’s a modern take on this – out of our own minds – out of wherever it is that in our own natures the Irrational is held;  and second, that this is happening in a world more apparently affected by chance and the

unexpected than by the laws that govern, for example, the human world as conceived by  Sophocles. (That Euripides was more affected by a sense of the frailty of Hellenic civilization than was Sophocles has always been axiomatic in classical studies.)

                    It’s worth unpacking this second issue a bit more. When we hear the characters reminding themselves and one another of the background story out of which the horrors before us have come (run a check yourselves on the frequency and extensiveness of these narratives in such a short work – see especially  ll. 432-445   spoken by the Chorus, which are then reiterated and expanded by Medea ll.473-485 ) we are constantly made aware that these final outcomes are not inevitable – in contrast with the trajectory of Sophocles’  Oedipus Rex where everything has been  predetermined.

                   Everyone in this play, including Medea herself, is taken by surprise by the turn of events.  There is no revelation comparable in scale and lucidity with that of Oedipus Rex where what we learn illuminates the nature of human existence in a world governed by the gods. Nor is Euripides studying cause and effect in the way Sophocles does through Oedipus. Oedipus is brought to realization of his own agency in the fate that has been determined for him.  He discovers the part played in his horrors by his own faults of pride and rage. He is ‘prepped’ by the prophet Tiresias into this realization which opens up his mind to the true nature of mortal existence in a world governed by fate and the gods, but where man is not meant, however, to lapse into passivity but to walk upright through the world, making his decisions by his best sense of morality and his understanding of human responsibility and power.

                It is the fact of his realization of this and his not shirking of it that makes him a tragic Hero, the entering of it into his mind’s lucidity so that he must depart beyond the confines of ordinary human life.  After such knowledge, what forgiveness , as T.S. Eliot asks.

                  We’re a long way from Medea when we’re thinking like this. There is no Tragic Hero in this play, no one whose mind is opened to an  understanding of human existence that is so visionary. Jason does not question himself, as we have already noted. Even after the event. And  Medea does not explore motives or ‘discover’ herself. She see-saws between horror and grief at what she is about to do and a smokin’ hot passion for punishment and revenge. But this is only wavering, not self-questioning. And because of the way Euripides presents her character this play is curiously without the Sophoclean dynamic created by character development and change. It’s something of a set piece, in that the mighty drama of the backstory picks up all who are caught in the local tornado. 

               And its meaning is, that, as the Messenger says ( and he has status as a commentator in this play – not always the case in Greek tragedies)

                   as for human life it is a shadow, as I have long believed.

                    (We might remind ourselves here of Macbeth’s 

                   Life’s but a walking shadow

                   A poor player that struts and frets its hour upon the stage …) 

                    And the Chorus, at l.1100, weaves this same threnody, culminating in this, the summary that

encapsulates the larger meaning of the play:

                    A throw of chance – and there goes Death

                   Bearing off your child into the unknown

                    Then why should mortals thank the gods.

                   We’re at the end of the line here. What the play tells us is that life is a shadow, permeated by accident and chance. That it is this that makes civilization, the rational lucidity of Hellas so precious and so vulnerable. And what it is vulnerable to is the dreadful savagery of the Irrational element in the human psyche, which balances nothing, which refines and orders nothing, which rages and destroys. Medea is the Embodiment of this, and the gods do nothing to protect any of us against the sort of force that she exerts in the world, a force coming out of the east, out of the barbaric kingdoms, whose overtaking of civilization seems inevitable. Once it is unleashed there is nothing that can take it on.

                   To write about Medea as a wronged woman, to reduce the focus to her feelings and   actions as if they were taking place in some explicable human sphere, is to seriously reduce your accuracy to the work, to write about it with the blinkers of thesis on.

                    In short, it is not a Feminist text.

                   So Quoth the Raven.