Medea has long been used as a frame to describe women who exhibit violence against their offspring, no matter how appropriate the comparison might be. There is even an opposing theory to the Gaia thesis: that instead of a Mother Earth which nourishes and cherishes us, we instead inhabit a planet determined to extinguish us. It is called the Medea Hypothesis.
Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, has been considered a Medea narrative, because it tells the story of a woman who kills her own daughter. I am more sympathetic to Medea than most, but even I wouldn’t suggest she has anything like the same justification for killing her sons as a woman trying to prevent her child being taken back into a life of slavery. Margaret Garner, on whose story Morrison’s novel was based, was described as ‘The Modern Medea’ in Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s 1867 painting of her, held by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.49 If we take Medea at her word when she says it is better to kill her children herself than have them killed by a hostile hand, then perhaps we can justify the connection. But Medea spends a great deal of Euripides’ play saying that she will kill her children to take revenge on those who have scorned her and believe they have done so with impunity. She exterminates Jason’s line: no children to keep him company in his old age, and no great likelihood of remarriage; who would agree to marry Jason after she heard what had happened to Glauce? This is a far cry from a woman making a desperate choice – as Garner did – to save her child from the horror of a life in slavery, at the cost of the life itself.
Medea’s story is unusual because it maps so easily onto contemporary lives: most of us don’t know what it’s like to accidentally kill our fathers and marry our mothers, but most of us do know what it is like to feel abandoned and betrayed. Even if our response is – hopefully – somewhat more measured than Medea’s. A story that could easily seem so alien – giant snakes, magic, boiling people in pots – is made so human by Euripides that it is still performed all over the world. The visionary Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa staged an all-male production which played in cities across Japan for twenty years. His stated goal50 was to show Japanese women that they could be as strong and straightforward as Medea. And though she is far from straightforward to the characters within the play, she is straightforward to us, the audience. We always know what she is thinking, feeling and planning, because she tells us. She is a complex character with multiple internal forces pulling her in different directions, but that is why she seems so real, so human. Unlike the externalized forces of divinely wrought desire which afflict Phaedra, or the cruelties of fate which condemn Jocasta, Medea is ravaged by her own psyche. For all her witchy powers, she is a woman in crisis, lashing out at those who have hurt her.
And this is why Medea’s story seems so real, no matter how much she can call on a divine chariot to escape her enemies. No wonder her story has been retold so successfully by women, from Christa Wolf’s excellent Medea, which keeps the story in its Greek frame, to Ludmila Ulitskaya’s expansive Medea and her Children, both of which were published in 1996. Ulitskaya’s Medea is a childless matriarch: she lives in a house to which her countless nephews, nieces and their offspring make an annual summer pilgrimage. This Medea – the last Greek in her Crimean village – discovers her husband’s betrayal long after he is dead. Her response is not to destroy her family, but to reach out to them and allow them to console her. Perhaps she is the inheritor of one of Medea’s most important characteristics: her brain. As Ulitskaya puts it: ‘Medea had a saying, which Nike was fond of quoting: “Cleverness covers any failing.”’
Let’s go back to Beyoncé, looking every inch a priestess of Hecate as she strides down the steps of her water-filled temple in her saffron-yellow gown wondering if it’s worse looking jealous or crazy. It’s an excellent question for Medea, not least because of the verb Beyoncé uses. She’s not worried about whether it’s worse to be jealous or crazy, but whether it’s worse to look jealous or crazy. She, like Medea, is acutely troubled by how she appears. The moment Creon leaves the stage, Medea tells the chorus that she was only pretending to be self-effacing, to diminish the virtues of her cleverness, so that he would bend to her will. She will not let anyone see her be weak, unless she can correct their misapprehension immediately, by either words or murder. Having been mistreated, Beyoncé concludes （swinging her baseball bat at a car windscreen） she’d rather be mad.