On Medea, Gendered Rage & The Need for Tragedy
Alternatively titled: why I have a child-killer tattooed on my leg.
‘Just to be clear, you have a child-killer tattooed on your leg?’
This was the question posed to me after a friend and went to see went to see the Medea at Soho Place staring the incomparable Sophie Okonedo and Ben Daniels.
Technically, yes. Medea was inked into the top of my left thigh in 2019 by the wonderful Emily Abbitt. The design was largely taken from William Wetmore’s statue, in which he’s eerily calm, pensive, holding her dagger to her side, whilst she contemplates the murder of her children.
Child-killer. Murderer. Witch. Sorceress. Barbarian. People have called Medea a lot of things.
Despite her fearsome reputation, I do not particularly think of Medea as a child-killer. Or if I do, it’s the part of her that I am least interested in. I also don’t think she’s mad, which puts me at odds with most modern adaptations of the play.
We should backtrack a little.
I never cared about the ancient world growing up; I wasn’t one of those kids obsessed with Ancient Greek myth, with all its gods and monsters. I’m still not, really. By sheer fluke, I started studying Latin at 11, peculiar since I went to a state, non-religious and non-grammar school. I took up Ancient Greek when I went to university, though I found it much harder to master. For a decade of my life, the Classics were what I dedicated all my time to. Though my work is in an entirely different field, it would be wrong to assume my nerdiness and passion has dissipated in any way, or that the ancient world is not important to me. It continues to punctuate my life in unexpected ways.
The day my Granny’s brain bled out catastrophically, when the only thing that could have saved her would have been to take a third of her skull off and we weren’t going to do that, and I knew the next morning would bring the last day I’d ever see her, I watched Helen McCrory’s Medea on repeat. I sat in an increasingly cold bath playing scenes over and over. I’ve heard it said that grief is a kind of madness, but when it comes to Medea, we never consider her grief.
In her Grief Lessons, Anne Carson posits that grief and rage are intrinsically linked: “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” When Medea addresses the women of Corinth, she is both logical and brutal: ‘I’m destitute. I have no city. No father. No brother. There is no haven for me now, no safety. There is only destruction.’
Medea is a woman taken to a foreign land by a man who promised her the earth, for whom she killed her father and her brother and then proceeded to birth and raise two sons, the most important thing in the world for ancient Greek men. And in return, he takes credit for her work, decides to leave her for a younger woman - a child, in some adaptations - and send her into exile with her children and call her all manner of ugly things.
When McCrory’s Medea asks ‘How can a man I worshipped as a god suddenly turn into a devil?’, I can only think of all the friends I have, two millennia later, who have dated that man. In 2019, I saw Simon Stone’s adaptation of Medea performed at the Barbican. In this version, Medea’s character had been kept a psychiatric institution for the previous year after having had a breakdown - the catalyst for which was in part the way her husband stole her scientific research, passed it off as his own and left her for a younger woman. Transformed to a modern day setting, audiences are able to understand a bit more why Medea is so enraged; she’s at the mercy of her husband’s words and a system that doesn’t help her.
Part of a speech (I believe) was cut from the current Soho Place version outlines the lack of Medea’s legal recourse:
‘Surely, of all the creatures that have life and will, we women are the most wretched. When we have brought a husband for an extravagant dowry, we must accept him as the owner of our bodies… But will the man we get be bad or good? Divorce is not respectable for women, and we cannot fight off the man … And if we are successful, your life is to be envied. But if not, death is better. If a man grows tired of company at home, he can go out and find a cure for boredom. We wives are forced to look to only one man. And they tell us that we live safe at home while they stride off to battle. Idiots. I would rather stand in the front line of battle three times than bear one child’.
It is unsurprising that this speech was quoted at Suffrage meetings in the 1920s. I find it even more astonishing, given that it was written by a man, performed by men to an audience who may well have been only made up of men. It should not feel revolutionary, but given how many modern male writers can’t conceive of women having their own interior world or feelings or ambitions or even quite frankly existing, it’s huge. What’s even more significant about this speech is that it isn’t about Medea, really - she’s a high-borne woman, a Bronze-age princess no less; this speech is about the Athenian men whose wives are kept cloistered. It is one of my favourites in all of literature, let alone ancient literature.
The problem with staging modern adaptations of Medea is that modern audiences don’t understand that - in the context of Greek tragedy - killing your children is not a problem. Or at least, killing your children is less of a problem if you’re a man.
Agamemnon is praised as one of the greatest heroes of the Trojan War, but we neglect to mention the fact he had his daughter sacrificed on an altar in the manner of an animal to get himself there. He might be petulant and the most annoying man ever to exist in literature, but he is not considered a child-killer. Are we just more comfortable with the idea that there are ‘worthy’ deaths? Why is the image of an adolescent girl being gagged and bound down on an altar, blood pouring off the wedding dress for the big day she was promised? I suspect it begins with m and rhymes with ‘get off my knee’
It’s astonishingly obvious to me that the decision by Medea to kill her children is borne not from desire to harm them, but out of lack of options. She’s been betrayed, abandoned, exiled, and subject to xenophobia and sexism of the worst kinds. It’s only a 90 minute play, but it certainly knows how to deliver a punch.
Perhaps the reason I love Medea so much is that her story is one of vindication, albeit at a cost. In the Euripidean version, Medea is positioned above the stage - deus ex machina - riding a chariot drawn by dragons provided by her father the god of the sun. Leaving Thebes, she heads to Athens; for the Athenian audience, not only is she a woman scorned, she’s a woman on her way. When the play was first performed at the city Dionysia (alongside three other plays), it came third in competition. Within a year, it was one of the the most performed play in Ancient Greece.
Two and a half thousand years later the story of female rage, of female grief is more pertinent than ever. Sometimes I’m asked if I think there’s still a need for tragedy, still a need for these stories. Given the state of the world right now, I’d argue it’s more essential than ever. When musician Paris Paloma released the chorus of their new song Labour on TikTok a few weeks ago, I doubt they would have expected the thousands of young women using the song as a jumping off point for sharing their rage. Scrolling through my feed, it’s clear this is some sort of collecting exhalation and exaltation. We have had enough.
Beautifully said.
Have you read Beloved by Toni Morrison? I think you might like it; it carries many of these themes and (sadly) is based on a true story of an enslaved woman named Margaret Garner. (Like feels like the wrong word, but I can't find the one I need.)