Recently I saw the trailer of the National Theatre of London’s forthcoming play Medea. First to appear is the back of a woman’s head, lush with dark hair; then comes the distant laughter of children against the background of a dense forest through which the woman, now shown in noire attire literally and figuratively, walks holding the hands of the children.
The children evanesce leaving the woman alone, stranded. She turns to look at us; her face is contorted with emotions I can best identify as sinister, exuding ominous foreboding. It’s the face of Medea; all the familiar threads of the disquieting, the darkening and the threatening hang loose, waiting to make the fabric of the totality of what we recognize today to be the figure of the Western literary canon’s poster child for the mother from hell.
The face could very well have belonged to Lady Macbeth the mannish wife in Shakespeare’s great tragedy of Macbeth, who famously taunted her husband’s manhood with the image of herself as the woman who is virile enough to dash the head of a baby suckling at her breast. But Lady Macbeth didn’t have any children; she was merely hypothesizing; one could be certain that had she had “babes” she would not have had the heart to break their heads. Euripides’ Medea, on the other hand, kills her children—all four of them--to earn eternal damnation in the annals of motherhood.
Yet, Euripides did not conceive of Medea as the sum total of her filicidal instincts. Around the time Euripides composed the wondrous tragedy of this doomed heroine of mythology, the maternal bond between mommy and child was not as culturally fetishized as it is today. How would Medea have been judged back then in the Greece of 3rd century B.C.?
The first time I had closely read Euripides' Medea, it was as a young English major, in India. The professor who taught us ancient Greek drama, had, in his own way, forewarned us about the pitfalls of reading literary texts out of context. He meant that we just might not be able to access the real kernel of Greek drama, without knowing any Greek and without having any idea of the moral universe to which these plays were literary responses.
To better understand what I read, I took a fast and furious tour of the Greek alphabets; I also did a quick read of Robert Graves' Penguin edition of the Greek myths to get a hang of concepts like oikos, daemon and hamartia, among others. Armed with a fragile, but what at that time, seemed an adequate notion of the Greeks as a whole, I approached the big stars of the Grecian dramatic pantheon, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
What stood out, for me, was the spree of inter-family killings in these plays. To goad a son to kill his own father was a rather routine act of a Greek mother and wife, as is evidenced by Clytemnestra's nagging of her son Orestes to slay his father Agamemnon upon his return to Thebes from the 10-year Trojan War. But the killings in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles were done for the sake of preserving a higher moral order, in the scheme of which mere familial love paled into insignificance.
So, when I read Medea, I was baffled. In this most celebrated of the tragedies by Euripides, Medea is a woman, who kills her children, not for any higher moral purpose, but putatively to seek personal revenge. The story of Medea goes thus: She is a barbarian—counterpart of the modern foreigner—who’s married to Jason, a Greek and has children with him. They live in the Greek city of Corinth. The play opens with a wrathful Medea, furious at having learned of Jason’s plan to marry Glauce, the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. An angry barbarian female is a threat to national security, and to preempt harm, Creon exiles Medea. The play ends on a note of sad mayhem. Medea knifes her children to death and poisons both Creon and Glauce. Medea then flees to Athens with the bodies of her dead children.
Blood is shed in Medea, but compared to fellow Greek tragedies the number of bodies felled are fewer. However to our very modern bourgeoisie sensibilities, the one momentous act of filicide committed by Medea has the impact of a million slaughtering on the battlefields of Troy.
As purveyors of modern adaptations of pre-modern literature, we are intolerant of some of the familial acts therein (we have less compunction in approaching Oedipus’ incestuous act with a lighthearted, almost jocular attitude) and relatively forgiving of others (Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his pre-teen daughter Iphigenia is just fine); our somewhat dour sensibility crucifies the slaying by Medea of her children as extreme monstrosity, the product of a psychopathic mind. Emphatically, in our eyes, Medea is a rotten mommy cum psychopath bundled into one, a pin up for motherhood gone horribly awry.
Witness the frames of references within which the ancient Medea typically pops up—every time there is news of a maternal filicide, in Texas or more recently in Utah, discourses in the media illuminate the horror of the act by invoking Medea. Medea could well nigh be a byword for the cannibal-mom, a woman deranged, scorned, fallen into postpartum depression and a woman who ill-deserves the sacred mantle of motherhood to begin with. Snapped, the Documentary series aired on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen Network, have women who “snap” because male hypocrisy has reached a critical mass in their lives and they can take it no more. The women who snap go on a homicidal rampage and the ghost of Medea flits across the TV screen like a Tasmanian devil overdosed on anti-estrogen.
Yet, the ancient Greeks would not have beheld Medea as a mad woman that ought to be locked up for good in the attic and from whom the neighborhood children ought to be protected. In light of the cultural mores as portrayed in Greek drama, the cruelty, in itself, ought not to have raised eyebrows—Medea’s slaying of her children is no more or no less scandalous than the inadvertent slaying by Oedipus of his father.
What, I presume would have aroused the moral chagrin of the literary Medea’s contemporaries, is the fact of her outsider-status, and the fact that she dared to marry a Greek despite being a Barbarian. In the traditional myth of Jason and Medea, the couple’s marriage was not recognized by the state as a bonafide marriage, and it could be surmised that the children of the interracial union were perceived as half-breeds, the mulattos of the time. According to a version of the myth, the children were killed by a mob of furious Corinthians because Medea had killed their king; it could be that the mob fury was a manifestation of a collective xenophobia.
Perhaps Euripides’ tweaking of the myth was intended to give Medea a bit of agency in sealing her own fate. To make Medea the slaughterer of her own children affirms the fact that she is a barbarian, bound, at the slightest provocation, to deviate from norms of civilization. One can’t help but feel that her filicide in the play is a reflection, not simply of her failed motherhood, but primarily of her barbarism; in other words, what Medea does fulfills an apriori stereotype of her.
In Euripides’ Medea, the eponymously named heroine is a doubly marginalized figure of the woman and the barbarian, a hyper-second class citizen by virtue of both gender and race/citizenship. In the play, as in life, she would have been judged as such, not on the basis of her maternal instincts.
One hopes that National Theatre’s production of Medea desists from reducing this most fascinating of all female protagonists in Western literature, to one thing or the other, for Medea remains firmly etched in my memory as a study in grief and rage in context.
No comments :
Post a Comment