Murderous Mothers: Postmodern Medea-Figures and Feminist Politics
Forthcoming with Peter Lang (2021)
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The mythological story of Medea, best known in the form of Euripides’s play from 431 BCE, is, at first glance, an unlikely source of feminist political literature. Although she is the titular character, Medea’s act of filicide places her outside of the position of role model or even the status of tragic hero(ine). It is easy to understand Medea as a figure who reinforces stereotypes about the monstrosity of women who decide to operate outside of societal norms. On the other hand, Medea also chooses to do something about her own victimization, she takes action when she is supposed to acquiesce to her situation. She sacrifices nearly everything for her own vision of justice and to regain some of the power she lost through her entanglement with Jason. This combination of Medea as monster and Medea as freedom fighter makes her a complicated figure within feminist literature and scholarship. In this book, I explore German-language adaptations of the Medea story from the late-20th century. During the period from the 1980s through 2000 a period that follows the height of the German New Women’s Movement (Germany’s “second wave” feminist movement), a wide variety of Medea adaptations were published by women with either explicit or implicit feminist aims. Despite the respect for and interest in mythology throughout German literary history, Medea was a figure that remained relatively untouched until this period, the most notable exception being Franz Grillparzer’s golden fleece trilogy from 1821. Therefore, it is notable to see so many Medea adaptations all within the final few decades of the 20th century. |
Chapters
A Forcible Return to the Womb: Elfriede Jelinek’s Melodramatic Medea Medea as Abortion Activist in Ursula Haas’s Freispruch für Medea Misunderstood Monologues: Christa Wolf and Dagmar Nick Try to Redeem Medea Out of Control Speech: Performance in Dea Loher’s Manhattan Medea |
I argue that these Medea adaptations largely fall into two camps, those that lean into Medea’s violent acts of revenge, often casting her as a feminist social justice warrior and those that highlight Medea’s victimhood and cast her as the epitome of the misunderstood and exploited woman. By examining texts representing these two sides of the same coin, I am able to determine what made Medea such an appealing figure for German feminist authors from this time period. In her own contradictions and ambiguities, Medea comes to represent many of the central debates within feminist movements themselves about how to best frame their political aims and the potential represented by increased leadership and power in the hands of women. Do we emphasize women as victims of a patriarchal/androcentric system? Or do we use fiction to imagine women as capable of achieving the empowerment and liberation that eludes them in real-life? In addition to these questions of political strategy, all these Medea adaptations, themselves new versions of an old story, must ask themselves what kind of political work literature is actually capable of doing in the first place.
Medea is a useful figure for addressing these questions because in the hands of authirs such as Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, and Dea Loher she transcends questions of agency and empowerment. Through her dramatic action and the subsequent futility of that action, Medea opens up a new avenue for feminist literature that does not rely on women’s emancipation as a plot point, or even an achievable goal. Medea is always forced to confront her own limitations. She takes us to the brink of what is possible and what is impossible and asks us to reflect on why this is the case. Furthermore, all of the Medea adaptations I examine use polyvocal narrative techniques to participate in a feminist project of challenging all-knowing, singular male subject/narrators. In other words, these Medea stories reveal that a collaborative understanding of subjectivity is one contribution that literature can make to the goals of feminist movements. The continued relevance of German-language Medea adaptations from the late-20th century comes from their ability to show us who we really are, even if those images are complicated and not particularly flattering.
Medea is a useful figure for addressing these questions because in the hands of authirs such as Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, and Dea Loher she transcends questions of agency and empowerment. Through her dramatic action and the subsequent futility of that action, Medea opens up a new avenue for feminist literature that does not rely on women’s emancipation as a plot point, or even an achievable goal. Medea is always forced to confront her own limitations. She takes us to the brink of what is possible and what is impossible and asks us to reflect on why this is the case. Furthermore, all of the Medea adaptations I examine use polyvocal narrative techniques to participate in a feminist project of challenging all-knowing, singular male subject/narrators. In other words, these Medea stories reveal that a collaborative understanding of subjectivity is one contribution that literature can make to the goals of feminist movements. The continued relevance of German-language Medea adaptations from the late-20th century comes from their ability to show us who we really are, even if those images are complicated and not particularly flattering.
