Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
—Perez, in The Mourning Bride by William Congreve, III.ii (1697)
Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.
[I am a man: I consider nothing human alien to me.]
—Terence, Heauton Timorumenos (163 BCE)
Prolegomenon
Throughout her wild career, Medea’s climactic, fateful decisions are impelled by her dangerous passions and enabled by her vaunted cleverness or sophia. Her story culminates in a truly horrific act: she slays her two children. She does this explicitly to hurt her husband Jason as much as possible for betraying her: “The children are dead. I say this to make you suffer” (E 1370). (References to Euripides, trans. Warner 1955, and Seneca, trans. Miller 1960, will be cited as E and S parenthetically.) Her mad vengeance against her perfidious spouse is motivated by jealousy. As she explains to the Chorus of Corinthian women in Euripides’ play: “a woman . . . when once she is wronged in the matter of love, / No other soul can hold so many thoughts of blood” (E 263-66). Her horrific revenge is as gory as the set piece of any slasher or horror film, and it has always left audiences feeling very uneasy. It is dreadful enough that after dispatching King Creon and his daughter, she kills her own two sons, but disturbingly she survives (as does Jason). So in the original versions, Medea escapes direct punishment for her notorious offenses. A recognition of how truly natural her feelings are, though, can point the way to a clearer understanding of this haunting tragic heroine. The seemingly counter-intuitive thesis of my essay will be that looking at her filicide in light of biology can prove illuminating. My exploration of Medea is thus intended as a test case for a Neo-Darwinian approach to literature, a consideration of conduct that appears to be maladaptive. In the pages below, we will see how recent findings in the life sciences can help us make sense of her shocking blood sacrifice.
Medea first appears onstage in operatic tragedies by Euripides and Seneca. Many later artists have also depicted her—there is even a Yiddish version, Jacob Gordin’s De Vilde Printsesin, oder, Medea’s Yugend (1898). Her history can be found in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius and book VII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. According to these myths, she “conceived an overwhelming passion” for Jason, which led her to help her beloved new husband and his Argonauts to obtain the Golden Fleece and return safely home to Greece (Metamorphoses, VII.10). Along the way, she aided and abetted them by doing “monstrous deeds . . . of murder and impious bloodshed” (S 127-36; cf. E 475-578). But when the play begins, Jason is about to have Medea banished from Corinth. He has divorced her in order to make a politic remarriage, thereby forming a “royal alliance” with King Creon (E 594). Medea responds by poisoning Jason’s Princess fiancée and her father the King, and then putting her own two sons to the sword before finally escaping in a flying chariot. (Surviving Greek vases portray this catastrophic scene; the Lucanian Calyx-Krater, c. 400 BCE, at the Cleveland Museum of Art is especially detailed.)
In Euripides’ play (431 BCE), Jason has become “wholly vile”: one of the most “worthless” men in Greece (E 229, 452). He is a callous perjurer, a shameless oath-breaker, and an opportunistic user of women (Burnett 1998, 194-224). Here, the female Chorus is sympathetic to the unfortunate Medea. Audiences witness how she is “dishonored,” and her incipient loss of status and comfort are symbolized by the bed and household motifs. This tragedy, moreover, is absolutely drenched in gender concerns. For example, Medea describes how heroic motherhood is—“I would very much rather stand / Three times in the front of battle than bear one child” (E 250-51)—while Jason wishes for masculine parthenogenesis in a world free of the distaff sex: “It would have been better far for men / To have got their children in some other way, and women / Not to have existed. Then life would have been good” (E 573-75). As the Chorus recognizes, parenthood entails “many troubles” (E 1097).
In Seneca’s version (c. 50 CE) in contrast, the Chorus favors Jason and the interests of Corinth. This Jason may be “ungrateful” (ingrate Iason, S 1021), but he is not quite such a jerk. In fact, his care for his sons, revealed in lines 544-49, proves to be his weak spot. As Medea notes: “Thus does he love his sons? ‘Tis well! I have him! The place to wound him is laid bare” (S 549-50). Seneca’s heroine is also more guilt-ridden, unbridled, and epigrammatic. It is conventional to read the Latin drama as an implicit indictment of becoming overly unruly, agitated, and revengeful by the author of a Stoic treatise “On Anger” (De Ira) (e.g. Schiesaro 1997). Certainly in both, Medea’s fuming jealousy is central.
Integrating work in classical dramatic criticism, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology, my argument will be, first, that her actions are comprehensible and realistically motivated, and second, that it is audiences’ apprehensive, half-buried recognition of their justification which makes her such a unnerving, truly tragic character. After looking at some traditional efforts to explain away her infanticide as abnormally inhuman, I’ll turn to findings from the life sciences and genetics that allow us to understand the rationale behind her deeds.
Medea the Illegal Alien
Hellenists have certainly done a great deal of brilliant work parsing Medea (see Pallas 1996; Bloom 2003; Mossman 2003; Griffiths 2006; Corrigan 2013). Her infamous retaliation, however, has usually led to judgments that she is unnatural. She is either a cartoony, superhuman being unbound by laws governing mortals; an uncivilized savage; overtly masculine; or fully psychotic. Textual evidence can be mustered to support these overlapping perspectives, as we will see, but my claim will be that hermeneutical efforts to contain her safely within such distancing matrices actually indicate the fearful power she holds as the ultimate “all-too-human” bad mother.
Advocates of her numinous, divine aspect focus on her deus ex machina getaway in the flying chariot of her grandsire, the sun god Helios. And in one of her awesome third-person descriptions of herself in the Latin, she proclaims her Nietzschean Will-to-Power (wille zur macht): “Medea is left—in her thou beholdest sea and land, and sword and fire, and gods and thunderbolts” (S 166-67). The verb she uses for “is left,” superest, means primarily “still exists” or “survives,” but its prefix super (above) suggests that she also abounds or overflows. In the dénouement, she appears to be literally beyond everyday human concerns, but prior to that her mindset aligns with that of mere mortals.
It has also often been suggested that Medea’s predominant traits are associated with the male warriors of epic. (In premodern societies, men often fought to increase their status and gain access to women; see Chagnon 1968, 2013; Gottschall 2008). Leading classicist Bernard Knox (1979) eloquently presents this position: “She has the main characteristics of the hero, the determined resolve, expressed in uncompromising terms: the verbal adjectives ergasteon (791), ‘the deed must be done,’ and tolmeteon (1051), ‘I must dare’” (297-98). Like Knox, Helene Foley (2001) offers a sophisticated and suasive reading highlighting Medea’s male side in her erudite, authoritative tome Female Acts in Greek Tragedy: “The vengeful Medea deliberately imitates a heroic brand of masculinity” (264). Foley declares that “Medea finally leaves female and even human limits (including human ethical limits) behind” (266; cf. McLure 1999). In terms of the rhetorical tropes and cultural norms informing Greco-Roman theater, these scholars are correct. As will be shown in the next section of this essay, however, her attitude and behavior actually do fall within a comprehensible female realm.
Yet another mark of Medea’s difference is that she sometimes seems quite foreign. (She comes from Colchis on the Black Sea in Eurasia, “the country which lies along the left strand of the Pontus e’en to the snows of Scythia” as Ovid put it in Heroides, XII.27-28). Her Orientalism is most conspicuous during the long scene in Seneca where she gets all witchy while singing magical incantations and preparing the poison (S 670-842), in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VII.1-424), and in Pierre Corneille’s Médée (1635). We glimpse some of this alterity in Euripides too, when Jason (who’s usually a self-serving, two-faced prevaricator acting in bad faith) accurately identifies her as a “barbarian” from a “foreign home,” and calls her “a monster, not a woman, having a nature / Wilder than that of Scylla in the Tuscan sea” (E 536, 1330, 1342-43). Again, these are fair portrayals of one side of her. Simultaneously, though, she appears like a recognizably bitter city housewife, albeit one more experienced, more skilled in medicinal poison, and better trained in oratory than most.
Especially manifest in Seneca, alternately, is her craziness. She becomes possessed by the three Furies: “My grief grows again and my hate burns hot; Erinys, as of old, claims my unwilling hand” (S 951-53; cf. E 1059, 1260). As early audiences knew, the Erinyes were Alecto (Unceasing in Anger), Tisephone (Avenger of Murder), and Megaera (Jealousy). As the Chorus asks: “Whither is this blood-stained maenad borne headlong by mad passion? What crime with reckless fury [furore] is she preparing?” (S 849-52; cf. E 1129-31). She is overcome by a “mad rage” (demens furor, S 930), and this defines her: “Now I am Medea” (Medea nunc sum! S 910; this fulfills her earlier cry, Medea fiam, “Medea will I be!” S 171). She fulminates like the stormy ocean: “As when rushing winds wage mad warfare, and from both sides conflicting floods lash the seas and the fluctuating [fluctuatur] waters boil, even so is my heart tossed” (S 940-43). The ways in which aspects of her personality are multifaceted or in disagreement—as all of ours are to some degree—and the ways she externalizes her mental states—again, something people still do today—reveal important things about her, but they do not make her inhuman.
Overall, then, while such established diagnoses are fine as far as they go, the motivations she shares with mere mortals are believably realistic. That intuitive recognition can be supported by elaborated by evolutionary biology.
Selfish Genes and Phenotypes
Findings in evolutionary biology have much to teach us concerning filicidal fury.
Attentively raising offspring is actually rather an uncommon practice in the animal kingdom; many fish, for instance, simply lay their eggs and then swim on. Most mammals, though, do vigilantly nurture their offspring. Human young are especially altricial, requiring a great deal of close attention during their extended childhood. Careful, laborious childrearing takes many years, and so it is unsurprising that evolutionary pressures have favored the instinctual growth of strong bonds between mother and child. So why, then, on rare occasions would human mothers murder their own flesh and blood? The reasons can be found in the cold, hard logic of selfish genes, which ties in with the underlying impetus for the overwhelming emotions their individual carriers feel.
Since infanticide does occur, that is, there should be a sound explanation for it. It can be found by considering things at the level of genes. For as biologists starting with Robert Trivers (1974) have ascertained, parent-offspring conflict is inevitable but explicable in terms of genetic self-interest. This perspective can help us grasp why and when mothers kill their offspring. Human individuals, like other animals, sometimes face catastrophic crises where what is probabilistically best for their chromosomes demands abandoning related phenotypes such as their children. (Biologists speak of “kin selection” and “inclusive fitness”: ways of looking at behavior advantageous to genes but not necessarily for individual bodies, and devise precise mathematical models to account for deeds of nepotism or sacrifice.) Filicide can be found throughout the living world, including among our closest relatives the great apes (de Waal 2007, Rees 2009). It is a part of the organic order of things, “Nature red in tooth and claw,” just like the warm and fuzzy images of devoted maternal kindness most folk prefer to focus on. As context, for example, exposure was widespread in the Classical world. (Exposure means leaving unwanted infants outside to succumb to the elements or predation; see Demand 1994, 6-8). Human brains have evolved to make “nepotistic altruism,” that is, a deep, abiding love for one’s blood relatives (storgé in Greek), highly compelling. Such inherent sentiments, inter alia, commit mothers to dedicated childrearing. Mothers are regularly willing to forgo their own well-being, like the pelican in early Catholic iconography, when that is good for the genes carried by their progeny. However, they have also adapted to deal with exceptionally dangerous and desperate circumstances where there is a strong likelihood that care is not warranted and is no longer the best option in trying to perpetuate their DNA. For example, there is “no hope” for Medea in Corinth, leading her to weaponize her sons instead (E 976-77, S 162-63). Under extraordinarily trying conditions, mothers, not wholly consciously, calculate their “parental investment,” which is always limited, and determine that they should not raise their young when the odds of their survival are very, very low. When it becomes clear that there is “no hope” for Medea in Corinth, she chooses to weaponize her sons instead of protecting them(E 976-77, S 162-63).
Especially when we consider societies beyond today’s relatively insulated neoliberal democracies with their ironic #FirstWorldProblems, it was commonplace for families to face excruciating challenges. The female Euripidean Chorus devotes a whole anapestic interlude to the weary travails of motherhood (1081-1115). Researchers use the term “vital loss decisions” when studying the choices forced upon people in such dire straits. Infanticide is one potential result. Looking at ancient or primitive cultures in their study Homicide, evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson (1988) report:
Raising 2 or 3 children to competent maturity—the life’s work of a successful woman—has typically required hard decisions about priorities, attentive management of social relations, ingenuity, luck, and decades of hard labor. . . . Infanticide can be the desperate decision of a rational strategist allocating scarce resources. . . . The circumstances in which infanticide occurs . . . correspond remarkably well with circumstances in which such infanticide is likely to enhance the fitness of the actors. . . . And yet as we read the tragic accounts of this desperate deed from one society after another, it is not the inhumanity of the unfortunate perpetrators that confronts us, but rather their humanity.
(41-42, 58-59)
“Enhancing fitness” means behaving in a way that improves genetic reproduction in the long term. Infanticide is clearly traumatic in terms of mental health, but nonetheless it sometimes makes sense.
A team of scientists led by Qi Li (2011) has recently analyzed how the brain deals with such calamities. Their experiments using fMRI brain scans found that “vital loss decisions” are cognitively and emotionally demanding. Such decisions produce
significant activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is involved in the processes of abstract reasoning and cognitive control, and in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), which is associated with emotional conflict and negative utility. In addition, the amygdala, a more primitive area sensitive to threatening information and negative emotion, . . . [is] activated.
In light of these findings, Li et al. hypothesized that “the wise strategy of ‘sacrificing a pawn to save a rook’ [was] inherited over the course of evolution.” In order to improve the chances of fighting on to try another time under more propitious circumstances, mothers would be induced to cut their losses (see Schrier 1985, Siegel 2005, Ellison and Gray 2009; cf. Takahashi and Okubo 2009). Such a deed is wrenching for parents, and Seneca’s Medea feels “accursed guilt” (S 931), then states “I am sorry for my act, ashamed” (S 989; see also E 1078-80, 1381-83). But given the high burdens of childrearing, especially in a premodern world without advanced medicine and state-sanctioned social welfare, filicide could be the thing to do.
Rivalrous Passions
While selfish genes may be the ultimate cause for behavior, the proximal causes are emotionally activated motives. In all her various depictions, Medea’s crimes are produced not by calculations of reproductive advantage but by her passions. This section endeavors to unpack such anguished, turbulent dispositions and show how they effect primal Darwinian imperatives. Even the most ferociously anti-social, apparently self-destructive actions have a compelling logic behind them.
Jealousy is one such irrationally rational sentiment. “It is natural / For a woman to be wild with her husband when he / Goes in for secret love,” Jason concedes (E 909-11). David Buss has convincingly explicated how an overwhelming, possessive concern with securing a loved one’s fidelity serves one’s genetic self-interest:
It’s unlikely that love, with the tremendous psychological investment it entails, could have evolved without a defense that shielded it from the constant threat from rivals and the possibility of betrayal from a partner. Jealousy evolved to fill that void, motivating vigilance as the first line of defense and violence as the last. (2000, 223)
Medea, who harps obsessively on the injustice in Jason’s betrayal of her, is an archetype of jealousy. Commentators disagree about whether her jealousy is provoked more by love or status, and, in a similar manner, about whether Jason amorously lusts for his new bride or, more pragmatically, desires the royal eminence in Corinth brought through this male trade in women. Medea’s own answer is clear: she sarcastically tells Aegeus that Jason now has “A passionate love—for an alliance with the king” (E 700). It may be useful to recall that the Latin invidia encompasses both envy and jealousy; whether it is one or the other or a mix of both, her outrage is strongly motivated (see Konstan and Rutter 2003, Sanders 2014, Toohey 2014). However we apportion it, Medea is upset over losing what should rightfully be hers—by their shared history, their love, their vows and promises (see E 161, S 478-81). As the Euripedean Chorus observes, Jason has breached all bonds: “Good faith has gone, and no more remains / In great Greece a sense of shame. / It has flown away to the sky” (E 439-41). Their lament foreshadows her departure after she has achieved payback, when Medea’s literal flight ironically parallels Jason’s figurative flight from principle. Again, the folk psychology displayed by authors of classical literature anticipates findings in modern cognition.
In reverse-engineering the emotions, scientists investigating human behavior now recognize that a refusal or inability to conduct oneself sensibly in one’s perceived best long-term interests can, paradoxically, turn out to be a savvy (albeit risky) strategy. This is because it is generally not a great idea to alienate or incite those who are scary and unpredictable. Discussing this “madman theory,” Steven Pinker points out that “righteous anger, and the attendant thirst for redress or vengeance, is a credible deterrent if it is uncontrollable and unresponsive to the deterrer’s costs” (1997, 423). Precisely because emotions trigger people to lash out in ways beyond conscious control, they are tremendously powerful.
In Euripides’s play, Medea explodes because she has been jilted by her true love (she is the paragon of crazy ex-girlfriends). As she reveals early on, “Now I am in the full force of the storm of hate / And have no harbor from ruin to reach easily” (E 278-79). One key to the Greek tragedy, then, is Jason’s mistaken notion that his spurned former spouse will prudently acquiesce to his desires like a self-interested, sensible social player; her “reasonable submission,” as he deems it, will be better for all (E 448).
If you wish for the children or for yourself
In exile to have some of my money to help you,
Say so, for I am prepared to give with open hand,
Or to provide you with introductions to my friends
Who will treat you well. You are a fool if you do not
Accept this. Cease your anger and you will profit. (E 610-15; see also 446-50)
This offer of custody will be rescinded; Medea is actually being abandoned all alone. While he knows first-hand how dangerous she can be—something that directly benefitted him on his epic quest—after her apparent capitulation he no longer believes that she will run amok and turn into a vindictive Fury ready to flame foe and family alike.
Jason’s limited, selfish worldview is his fatal flaw, and it is precisely his insolent hubris or lack of a more empathic understanding of his wife’s anger that permits her to trick him later in the scene (see E 867-913).
Medea is not interested in settling for the best payoff she can get to exit quietly. In Revenge Tragedy (1996), John Kerrigan notes that “according to the ancient attitude shared by Medea . . . unless one is both jealous of honour and the object of envy one lacks human worth and credit” (94). Medea cares to her core about her rightful standing; this makes her a ticking bomb, the absolute opposite of a pushover. She is as prickly about maintaining her rep as any mean-girl Queen Bee today. In fact, Medea simply cannot countenance the kind of outcome Jason proposes because it would make her such a loser, and a publically demeaned and “dishonor[ed]” one at that (E 33).
The combination of affronts sparks her detonation. More alertly than some of her antagonists, the anxious Chorus in Seneca’s version recognizes her overwhelming wrath: “No violence of fire or of swelling gale, no fearful force of hurtling spear, is as great as when a wife, robbed of her love, burns hot with hate” (S 579-82). Her seething rage here is a force beyond individual agency. In an essay on the problematic infanticide, Patricia Easterling (1977) observes that Medea “sees the murder of her children as a means of punishing her enemies. The deed will be ‘most unholy,’ but she will do it because her enemies’ laughter is not to be tolerated. . . . Throughout we are invited to take Medea seriously as a real human being” (185, 191).
This sort of revenge impulse has typically been considered a masculine trait, and those “altruistic punishers” who enact what Sir Francis Bacon called “a kind of wild justice” have usually been male. One thinks of Hieronymo in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, and Henry V, Milton’s Samson Agonistes, or the Count of Monte Christo. Medea, though, transcends that gender binary. Thus Creon: “Thou, thou contriver of wickedness, who combinest woman’s wanton recklessness and man’s strength, with no thought of reputation!” (S 266-68). She has truly pledged herself to spiteful payback; as she explains to the Nurse: “’Tis sweet to drag others down when thou art perishing” (S 428). Like those other notable avengers, she is herself paradoxically the reluctant author (ipsa auctorem, S 979) of a revenge plot, and lead actress in a script that seems like the work of a higher power.
Medea’s Mission Statement
One of the things that makes Medea such a memorable, resonant dramatis persona is that she can articulate her outlook so poetically. (Possibly no other protagonists in Western theater would achieve this until Shakespeare created flawed, doomed kings such as Richard II and Lear.) In her grand speech and exchange with the Chorus halfway through the play, the Euripidean Medea presents her mission statement.
MEDEA: I weep to think of what a deed I have to do
Next after that; for I shall kill my own children.
My children, there is none who can give them safety.
And when I have ruined the whole of Jason’s house,
I shall leave the land and flee from the murder of my
Dear children, and I shall have done a dreadful deed.
For it is not bearable to be mocked by enemies.
So it must happen. What profit have I in life?
I have no land, no home, no refuge from my pain.
My mistake was made the time I left behind me
My father’s house, and trusted the words of a Greek,
Who, with heaven’s help, will pay me the price for that.
For those children he had from me he will never
See alive again, nor will he on his new bride
Beget another child, for she is to be forced
To die a most terrible death by these my poisons.
Let no one think me a weak one, feeble-spirited,
A stay-at-home, but rather just the opposite,
One who can hurt my enemies and help my friends;
For the lives of such persons are most remembered.
CHORUS: Since you have shared the knowledge of your plan with us,
I both wish to help you and support the normal
Ways of mankind, and tell you not to do this thing.
MEDEA: I can do no other thing. It is understandable
For you to speak thus. You have not suffered as I have.
CHORUS: But can you have the heart to kill your flesh and blood?
MEDEA: Yes, for this is the best way to wound my husband.
CHORUS: And you, too. Of women you will be most unhappy.
MEDEA: So it must be. No compromise is possible. (E 791-819).
Under the circumstances, she essentially has no alternative, and her speech is marked by a sense of imperative doom. She must take the lives of her dear sons: they are hopelessly outcast and unwitting accomplices in her struggle against Corinthian royalty. Her killing spree will be fitting retribution since she shall destroy the whole of Jason’s house as he has destroyed her life. Certainly one of the striking elements of her terrible words is how carefully she calculates the effect on Jason’s line, which will be cut off completely. (He himself will survive so as to most egregiously and irremediably suffer.) Her planned atrocities are basically the sole means she has to extricate herself from an impossibly bad situation. Lastly, pace Creon’s words quoted above, she does have a heroic reputation to maintain. She refuses to become known as a Patient Griselda who enables her husband’s malfeasance. A key line in Euripides comes when she predicts what the chain of events started by Jason’s abandonment will bring her enemies: “Pain that will mean something” (E 367). Pain that will mean something. She knows what will cause the most hurt—psychologically, symbolically, tangibly, biologically. Moreover, it will be personally and publically restorative. This is totally human.
In Virtuous Violence (2015), Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai shed light on the retaliatory mindset:
People are retributive. We punish harm-doers when we believe that it is fundamentally just to do so and when we are morally outraged by what they have done—not when it is rational to do so in terms of preventing future harm. . . . To defend vital relationships, to redress grievous wrongs, or to terminate intolerable relationships, people may feel morally impelled to homicide. In the eyes of the perpetrator, pain, maiming, or death is just what the victim deserves—it is justice.
(37, 197)
Their findings are based on studies conducted around the world, but this encapsulation amounts to a lucid gloss on the singular character of Medea.
In the ancient society presented by Euripides and Seneca, the cultural forces weighing on Medea leave her in the inescapable, deadly situation necessitating filicide and flight. She occupies a nexus of alliances and allegiances, of rumors and reputations, of affinities, obligations, and histories. All these factors bond people in a communal web and determine how a person must conduct himself or herself—how to live or die. For those with heroic stature, shameful loss of honor was considered utterly devastating. As Burnett observes, “
Medea nonetheless achieves what a fated mortal can—she determines the ethical color of her inescapable deed. . . . This Medea paradoxically kills as mother, and also a woman cornered, as any mortal may be, by past actions, time, and causality” (1998, 206).
The divorce imposed by Jason brings about an extreme attenuation or reduction of eminence and regal position for Medea; moreover, it leaves her sons delegitimized by fiat. And since for humans and their primate relatives, loss of status corresponds to decreased reproductive success, it is something worth fighting over. Really, it is no exaggeration to state that Jason threatens to erase her very identity. She is, therefore, absolutely honor-bound when Jason breaks faith to align herself with the daimonic power of the curse-fiend to pay him back:
Force every way will have it they must die, and since
This must be so, then I, their mother, shall kill them.
Arm yourself in steel, my heart! Do not hang back
From doing this fearful and necessary wrong. (E 1240-43)
She has been pushed to the brink without any other viable face-saving options or acceptable back-up plans. Killing her “guiltless sons” thus has to happen (S 283). Unsurprisingly, as social scientists have found, women who commit or attempt filicide almost always do so under unsustainably stressful situations (see Hoffer and Hull 1981; Hausfater and Blaffer Hrdy 1984; Rose 1986; Meyer, Oberman et al. 2001; Spinelli 2003). It is at exactly those abysmal moments when things are irreparably falling apart that a Darwinian calculus induces mothers to contemplate murdering their own babes.
Medea is embedded in ancient Greek culture, but similar pressures can also catch modern women in their web. (On modern versions of the Medea story, see Thorburn 2010 and Beeler 2011; for one such instance, see Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats [1998].) As in many a modern drama, real and theatrical, the divorce conflict in Corinth centers on a custody battle: MEDEA: To scorn the wealth of kings, my soul, as well thou knowest, hath strength and wont. I ask but this: that I may have my children as comrades of my flight, that in their bosoms I may pour forth my tears. Thee new sons await.
JASON: I confess that right gladly would I yield unto thy prayer, but a father’s love [pietas] forbids; for that I should permit this thing, not Creon himself, my king and father-in-law, could force me. This is my reason for living, this, my heart’s comfort, consumed as it is with cares. Sooner could I part with breath, with limbs, with light. (S 540-49)
Jason identifies their two little boys as more valuable than anything else he has, including his own life. But knowing this, Medea knows how best to strike against him.
The Medea we see onstage does not go on to reproduce. (In some surviving versions of her legend, however, she marries Aegeus and they have a son named Medus; see Foley 2001, 267.) The play was not, presumably, intended to function didactically as a proto-evolutionary object lesson about exactly when it would be warranted to kill one’s offspring (or how to go about avoiding such situations). Rather, it was an exploration of the intense, fraught circumstances in which such crimes occur and a tragic representation of the effect on both the survivors and victims of such a devastating transgression.
The Tygers of Wrath
Both ancient playwrights use feline similes to characterize Medea, as does Ovid (author of a lost Medea drama) in a lengthy tangent in his Amores. It is probable that attentive play-goers in Athens or Rome would have detected an intentional echo to a passage in Aeschylus’ Oresteia (trans. 1991). In Agamemnon, the first play of that trilogy, the Chorus sings of a lion cub reared as a pet in a house, until it grows up and wreaks bloody carnage (lines 717-49). The charming yet dangerous pussycat represents Helen, sister of Clytemnestra and an even more destructive femme fatale. She had been gloriously welcomed by the Trojans but of course ends up causing the city’s annihilation: “Like a lion, she came to Troy.” Great cats associate Medea with the kind of wild ferocity that violates the most basic norms of domestic behavior.
Early in Euripides’ play, the Nurse tells the Chorus that Medea is seriously upset: “Such a look she will flash on her servants / If any comes near with a message, / Like a lioness guarding her cubs” (E 187-89). This comparison shows her protective side. It establishes her willingness to fight for her boys as a good mother should, before Jason’s repudiation.
Seneca alludes to this trope towards the cataclysmic conclusion of his adaptation, when Medea puts the endgame in motion by sending her sons to the palace with the poisoned gifts. The Chorus describes her wrathful, shifting physical movements and expressions (849-61), then uses a zoological image: “Hither and thither she wanders, as a tigress, robbed [orba] of her cubs, ranges in mad course through the jungles of Ganges” (S 861-65). Changing the lioness guarding her cubs to the tigress robbed of her cubs (orba: bereft; bereaved; childless) helps indicate that even before killing them, her boys are lost to her.
While Ovid’s script about Medea is unfortunately lost, one of several mentions of her in his extant writings also utilizes a feline figure. In Amores, II.xiv, a bitter love poem, Ovid rails against abortion after his mistress Corinna becomes pregnant. He denounces Roman women who avoid motherhood for illegitimate reasons. In contrast, Medea and Philomela (raped and mutilated by Tereus, then turned into a nightingale, as recounted in Metamorphoses VI), are amply provoked:
Child-blood on Medea’s hands excites our horror, dismembered
Itys brings tears to the eye:
Parental savagery rampant. Yet both these women had bitter
Cause to destroy their own dear flesh—
Revenge on a husband.
(27-33, trans. Green 1982)
Horror, yes, but the motives are understandable. Ovid’s ambivalent judgment finds a curious tonal parallel in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (c. 1580-85/2002). Sydney writes of “the sour-sweetness of revenge in Medea” (222).
Conclusion: Blood Tragedy
I have tried to humanize Medea by showing that she is caught in a truly awful situation in which her ultimate course of action must be bad. That effort might be conceived as the product of a dialogue between Aristotle and Darwin, the founding fathers of literary criticism and evolutionary biology respectively. The Greek philosopher saw Athenian drama firsthand some decades after Euripides, whom he considered “obviously the most tragic of poets” (though he considered the chariot a “contrivance,” 101, 103; trans. 2001). According to Aristotle’s defintion of tragedy, Medea is a prototypical tragic protagonist. “
Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude . . . accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions. . . . For our pity is awakened by undeserved misfortune, and our fear by that of someone just like ourselves” (Poetics 95).
We react fearfully to a performance of Medea because we fathom how desperate her position is and can relate. We pity her and her sons, and at some level we can empathize with her, too, making this a Trauerspiel (a mourning play). Because human audiences are so heavily invested in powerfully beneficial ideals of caretaking maternity, its thresholds or contrasts are enormously troubling. Seeing such an enactment of tragedy is cathartic, a healthy, quasi-ritualistic purging of negative feelings.
The archetypal conflicts in our greatest stories reflect the crucial, oftentimes heartrending, struggles humans have perennially encountered in a frightening, capricious world. As Guildenstern asks the Player in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1991): “Do you know any good plays? . . . One of the Greeks, perhaps? You’re familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics? Matri, patri, fratri, sorori, uxori?” (32). As gregarious primates driven to act selfishly by our genes but also sustained by networks of blood relations and society to whom we’re inextricably bonded by love, friendship, or kinship, we are frequently pushed and pulled in opposing directions. Timeless characters such as Antigone in Sophocles’s play, or Shakespeare’s ruthlessly ambitious yet strangely sympathetic Macbeth, embody these tensions, and their doomed struggles still enthrall audiences. (On the endurance of neoclassical tragedy, see Watson 1990; Dudouyt 2010.)
Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, it thus seems reasonable to assume that tragedy persists as a genre because it offers intense, attention-grabbing depictions of prototypical antagonisms which are resolved negatively. Such struggles continue to preoccupy people today, revolving typically around status and mates (Nettle 2005).
In Medea, tragedy results because the heroine is driven to resort to desperate, horrific means to thwart Jason’s attempts to increase his own status through by forming advantageous alliances and practicing treachery.
Medea is an ancient character from a culture far removed from our own, but even today mothers in despair still intentionally kill or attempt to kill their children with alarming frequency. Though they do not typically behave or speak with the same tragic grandeur and lyricism she displayed, her spirit survives.Works Cited
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