Murderous Mothers
Late Twentieth-Century Medea Figures and Feminism
Forthcoming with Peter Lang (2022)
|
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 twentieth-century (1980s-2000). This 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 largely under-appreciated Therefore, it is notable to see so many Medea adaptations all within the final few decades of the 20th century. |
Chapters
Medea as Witch and Colonial Subject: Provocative Female Bodies in Freispruch für Medea Can Medea Speak? Voice and Victimhood in Medea Adaptations by Dagmar Nick and Christa Wolf Performance and Gender Performativity in Dea Loher’s Manhattan Medea A Forcible Return to the Womb: Elfriede Jelinek’s Melodramatic 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.
In my first chapter, “Medea as Witch and Colonial Subject: Provocative Female Bodies in Freispruch für Medea,” I delve into Ursula Haas’s relatively unknown Medea story from 1987. Haas’s explicitly feminist Medea provides a foundation for several key concepts that link the Medea mythology and the feminist movements in the German context, including reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and the erasure of colonial history. Haas’s emphasis on Medea’s body, her feminine, seductive body, as well as her colonial body, highlights both the political potentials and the blind spots of the West German New Women’s Movement. In her most significant departure from the classical Medea plot, Haas changes Medea’s child-negating act from a filicide to an abortion, directly commenting on contemporaneous feminist political debates over the medicalization of reproductive healthcare. When Medea uses her body to give as well as to take life, Haas emphasizes Medea’s multi-valent and dangerously witchy corporeality. However, Haas undercuts her own message about female bodily autonomy by also relying on colonial stereotypes when classifying Medea’s outsider status, thereby precluding possibilities for solidarity between groups of women.
In the second chapter, “Can Medea Speak? Voice and Victimhood in Medea Adaptations by Dagmar Nick and Christa Wolf,” I examine stories in which Medea is not a murderer, but rather a victim of misinformation. In order to consider the interplay between voice and silencing and that of victimization, I analyze Dagmar Nick’s Medea, ein Monolog (Medea, a Monologue) (1988) and Christa Wolf’s Medea. Stimmen (1996) (Medea: A Modern Retelling) (1998) alongside contemporaneous feminist and postcolonial theoretical texts by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) and Luce Irigaray (1981; 1991). These four works interrogate the process of trying to give voice to and to capture the voices of people who have been marginalized. Read together they paint a pessimistic picture about the ability of such voices to become comprehensible and the ability of such people to act and to speak as individuals. This understanding of victimhood as a gendered inheritance of women also ties into feminist concerns about the process of mythologization as enacted through repeated storytelling by universalized subjects. By depicting a Medea who is not violent, Wolf and Nick create a Medea who cannot be heard, who is fated to always be a victim of masculine power.
In the third chapter of this book, titled “Performance and Gender Performativity in Dea Loher’s Manhattan Medea,” concerns about feminist storytelling become even more fraught. In her play from 1999, Loher puts the concepts of performance and of mythological adaptation themselves under the microscope. Loher’s Medea lives up to the title of this book, and then some, as she engages in acts of performative self-harm and of dramatic violence in a play that ends with several people dead and a house in flames. Loher sets her Medea story in 1990s New York City, also issuing a critique of capitalist exploitation through the replacement of King Creon with the Sweatshop Boss. Loher’s unique cast of characters goes on to include Velasquez, an artist who only makes copies, and Deaf Daisy, a gender-bending character with psychosomatic hearing loss. Both figures push readers of this play to rethink how identity is constructed over time and through interactions with other people. With these themes in mind, I would be remiss if I did not to combine my reading of Loher’s play with Judith Butler’s contemporaneous work of the 1990s and 2000s on gender performativity, thereby explicating how grief, loss, guilt, and shame shared with an audience generates a model for collaborative performance both within and outside of gendered categories.
These connections between feminist political debates, language, storytelling, and Medea all come together in my final chapter, “A Forcible Return to the Womb: Elfriede Jelinek’s Melodramatic Medea.” Although Jelinek’s controversial novel Lust (1989) does not engage as explicitly with the Medea mythology as the other texts I examine, it is still a model for the way Medea figures have been used in German-speaking contexts to engage with feminist political debates. Jelinek’s depiction of sexual violence mirrors the domestic conflict that serves as the backbone for the Medea story, while also connecting Medea’s internal conflict to melodramatic tropes of the self-sacrificing mother. Most often read as a work of anti-pornography, I demonstrate how reading this novel as a melodramatic Medea story opens up interpretive possibilities that help explain the novel’s final scene of filicide. Jelinek draws on numerous aspects of the Medea story in her characterization of the, often exploitative, relationship between men and women and in doing so, she pessimistically underscores the difficulty of escaping social constraints to imagine something different for ourselves and for our children. By crafting a melodramatic Medea story with a shifting narrative perspective, Jelinek encourages her readers to pause for self-reflection and to recognize their own complicity in systems of systemic oppression. Jelinek’s Medea adaptation pushes us to see the violent extremes of the world as it is, thereby hopefully prompting us to work for change, however impossible it might seem to be.
In the second chapter, “Can Medea Speak? Voice and Victimhood in Medea Adaptations by Dagmar Nick and Christa Wolf,” I examine stories in which Medea is not a murderer, but rather a victim of misinformation. In order to consider the interplay between voice and silencing and that of victimization, I analyze Dagmar Nick’s Medea, ein Monolog (Medea, a Monologue) (1988) and Christa Wolf’s Medea. Stimmen (1996) (Medea: A Modern Retelling) (1998) alongside contemporaneous feminist and postcolonial theoretical texts by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) and Luce Irigaray (1981; 1991). These four works interrogate the process of trying to give voice to and to capture the voices of people who have been marginalized. Read together they paint a pessimistic picture about the ability of such voices to become comprehensible and the ability of such people to act and to speak as individuals. This understanding of victimhood as a gendered inheritance of women also ties into feminist concerns about the process of mythologization as enacted through repeated storytelling by universalized subjects. By depicting a Medea who is not violent, Wolf and Nick create a Medea who cannot be heard, who is fated to always be a victim of masculine power.
In the third chapter of this book, titled “Performance and Gender Performativity in Dea Loher’s Manhattan Medea,” concerns about feminist storytelling become even more fraught. In her play from 1999, Loher puts the concepts of performance and of mythological adaptation themselves under the microscope. Loher’s Medea lives up to the title of this book, and then some, as she engages in acts of performative self-harm and of dramatic violence in a play that ends with several people dead and a house in flames. Loher sets her Medea story in 1990s New York City, also issuing a critique of capitalist exploitation through the replacement of King Creon with the Sweatshop Boss. Loher’s unique cast of characters goes on to include Velasquez, an artist who only makes copies, and Deaf Daisy, a gender-bending character with psychosomatic hearing loss. Both figures push readers of this play to rethink how identity is constructed over time and through interactions with other people. With these themes in mind, I would be remiss if I did not to combine my reading of Loher’s play with Judith Butler’s contemporaneous work of the 1990s and 2000s on gender performativity, thereby explicating how grief, loss, guilt, and shame shared with an audience generates a model for collaborative performance both within and outside of gendered categories.
These connections between feminist political debates, language, storytelling, and Medea all come together in my final chapter, “A Forcible Return to the Womb: Elfriede Jelinek’s Melodramatic Medea.” Although Jelinek’s controversial novel Lust (1989) does not engage as explicitly with the Medea mythology as the other texts I examine, it is still a model for the way Medea figures have been used in German-speaking contexts to engage with feminist political debates. Jelinek’s depiction of sexual violence mirrors the domestic conflict that serves as the backbone for the Medea story, while also connecting Medea’s internal conflict to melodramatic tropes of the self-sacrificing mother. Most often read as a work of anti-pornography, I demonstrate how reading this novel as a melodramatic Medea story opens up interpretive possibilities that help explain the novel’s final scene of filicide. Jelinek draws on numerous aspects of the Medea story in her characterization of the, often exploitative, relationship between men and women and in doing so, she pessimistically underscores the difficulty of escaping social constraints to imagine something different for ourselves and for our children. By crafting a melodramatic Medea story with a shifting narrative perspective, Jelinek encourages her readers to pause for self-reflection and to recognize their own complicity in systems of systemic oppression. Jelinek’s Medea adaptation pushes us to see the violent extremes of the world as it is, thereby hopefully prompting us to work for change, however impossible it might seem to be.
