Page 23 - GALIET INFINITE MEDEA: Euripides IV

Furies turned Eumenides, Medea is closer and constant in us because of her complex mytho-dramatic (foreigner-goddess- sorcerer) interactions and metamorphoses. Thus. Primordial, infinite Medea 3⁄4 foreigner, goddess, sorceress, conjurer, lover, helper, the other, hero, trespasser, murderer, griever, etc. 3⁄4 becomes far more indispensable to our collective imagination (a cataclysmic trigger), than trivial Medea 3⁄4 the Athenian, Corinthian cultic-ritual mother and the Thesean, Jasonian initiatrix.
Greek women can. Despite Sourvinou-Inwood’s sketchy Medean-Persian association, her reliance on Jason’s assertion that, “no Greek woman would have dare do this,” (1339) to defend her ‘eastern distancing’ thesis, backfires. The male audience knows this is false, enhancing irony and blurring the boundary between tragedy and comedy, tears and laughter.40 Greek women, under revenge-heat or bacchant trance, are capable of despicable acts. Medea’s killing of her children would have evoked Procne’s stabbing of her son Itys (Ovid Met. 6) and of both sisters cooking him up, a la Titus Andronicus,41 to dish him out to Procne’s rapacious husband, Tereus, in revenge for raping and cutting the tongue of Procne’s beloved sister, Philomela, daughter of King Pandion of Athens. This gory, revenge-infanticide tale evokes Medea’s in the stirring and blurry hour.
40Paradoxically, savage chthonian realities lead to humour rather than gloom. For life is a comic tragedy.
41Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus cooks up and serves her Tamora’s children to avenge murder of his children and daughter Lavinia’s mutilation-rape. Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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