The Mother of All Horror Stories
This has been Medea week. I have been obsessed with the play. Read a couple of translations and I gotta say, if you want horror, this is the Mother of all horror stories.
Above is an 1898 poster for the Sarah Bernhardt performance. It captures the madness. Such a better promotional image than the current bland, self-conscious style of movie poster — a montage of characters looking like they are practicing dramatic facial expressions for an Instagram selfie.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler (I mean, the play was written 2500 years ago, so the reveal is long revealed) to say that at the end, blood-smeared and triumphant, carrying the dead bodies of her two sons, Medea escapes in a flying chariot drawn by dragons, helpfully sent by her Grandfather, the sun god Helios. Evidently Euripides ended more than half his plays with shameless deus ex-machina solutions.
As I was thinking about this, and laughing at the extravagant spectacle of it, I suddenly remembered Mozart’s marvelous (as in full of magical marvels) opera Don Giovanni, about the seducer better known to English audiences as Don Juan. Back pre-pandemic, the UGA opera program put on a very respectable performance of it which included a wonderfully staged ending where rasty demons pull Don Giovanni, kicking and screaming, down into the blazing inferno of hell.
Both plays deal with men and women navigating the rigid rules of patriarchy. Both stories come from cultures that are unabashedly patriarchal, where women are owned by men, sexual roles are rigidly defined, and the rules of sexuality are unforgiving. Don Giovanni falls down to Christian hell (not because he hurts women, but because he screws the wives and daughters of powerful men), and Medea flies up to the pagan heavens, eventually landing in Athens where she marries a king and has many more sons. If I have to live in a man’s world, it seems quite better to be pagan than Christian.
One commentary I read on Medea talked about the cold, rational, “civilized” nature of Jason’s dialog as opposed to Medea’s hot, irrational, “barbarian” rage. Jason explains to Medea that, of course, he has to take a Greek wife. Medea is not Greek and marriage with her is not recognized as legal. By hitching up with the daughter of a Greek king, he is protecting her and their sons. Her jealousy is silly and petty. She responds with passionate intensity that is so extreme it is terrifying, as all her actions are terrifying, coming straight from the unmanaged Id. Who could live a mundane, day-to-day life (dinner with the kids, walking the dog, buying home appliances) with a person like that?
But it seems to me, Medea turns the tables on that whole binary of rational civilized man/irrational feral woman. She analyzes her situation quite coolly. Sees that she, as an individual woman, is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. What matters to Jason, to the system in which they live, is that which grants a man immortality. Two things: great deeds done at the point of death and sons carrying on one’s legacy.
Medea overcomes her passionate self-interest, her deep anguish about her boys (there’s a heart-breaking scene where she argues back and forth with herself about whether or not to go through with the murders), to complete a rational and cold act of pure revenge which destroys Jason emotionally — he who was so proud of rising above foolish, womanly feelings. She kills Jason’s chances at glorious immortality. His sons and possible future sons are dead. His chance to be king or to be welcomed in any Greek city is ruined. His name is disgraced by her violent actions. She wipes out the glory he had been accumulating through heroic deeds. He will die desolate and alone while napping under the bow of the now rotting Argo. A beam falls off and crushes him.
Medea sees the structure of that culture, of Jason’s heroic place in it, and uses her insight — impassively, cruelly — to destroy the man who denied her passionate devotion to him.
