Medea is a very generative figure within Early Modern French Literature (La Péruse, 1556; P. Corneille, 1635; Th. Corneille, 1660; Longuepierre, 1694). Her myth has benefited from several feminist and postcolonial rewritings (Wolf, 1996; Agnant, 2001; Moraga, 2001; Bessora, 2004), all of which offer the opportunity to dislodge the canon and to hear different voices in various historical contexts. Recent scholarly analyses suggest that the myth can be read as a psychopolitical tale whose main character is assigned to a dominated position. However honorable Medea's knowledge and status have been in her past, as soon as she arrives in Corinth, she faces injustice. She tries to confront the hegemonic structure of the city, using its own procedures, but she fails, until violence imposes itself as her only way out. Her subordination does not only proceed from her gender, but also from her representation as “the subaltern, the Other, the misfit, the stranger” (Kekis, 2010). In Corneille’s play, she qualifies herself as an exile, “au milieu d’une terre étrangère, sans support, sans amis, sans retraite, sans bien,” and is constantly disregarded as a barbarian and a monster, compared to the Greeks, who think of themselves as a civilized and tolerant nation. “Barbare humanité,” whose tolerance is nothing but a way to hide an iniquitous negotiation: Créuse offers to strip her twice, first by taking her children away from her, and secondly by dispossessing her of her gown, the only remainder of her origins. Furthermore, reading Euripides’ tragedy through a postcolonial perspective shows that Medea and Jason’s marital relationship shares some similarities with the colonial structure of domination (Shama, 2017). Medea appears as a figure of a colonized woman compelled to commit her crimes, and Jason as an oppressor and a colonizer, who uses her to build his own territory, and yet maintains his conviction that he has done her a favor by drawing her out of her primitive origins.
Crossing feminist and postcolonial readings of this myth, the figure of Medea seems therefore to have the potential of a rising icon. In 2020, Juliette Cherbuliez (University of Minnesota) published a captivating monograph focused on the myth, with the stimulating title, In the Wake of Medea: Neoclassical Theater and the Arts of Destruction. It is a crucial resource to enlarge our understanding of the myth and to sharpen our interpretation of works by Corneille, Rotrou, and Racine, as well as by Ovid, Pasolini, Slimani, and others.
How do you understand Medea’s myth and what can we learn from it?
We often think of Medea as a story of a woman who kills her children, but that is her last action. It is the denouement. The myth says so much more; she does so much more: she destroys two or three kingdoms, kills a princess, rejuvenates fathers. Understanding this complex myth as an infanticide is a reduction of Medea’s political power to the domestic sphere. Instead, we can see it as a story about our inability to accept foreign people, our propensity to see them as dangerous, barbarian or uncivilized.
The expression I use to describe Medea’s ethos is the contranym cleaving, in its two opposing meanings, cleaving to and cleaving from. On the one hand, Medea is strongly cleaved to Jason and her children, and she tries to bond with Creon’s city. But she is also a foreign woman who runs away with a stranger, helps him to obtain things he should not, destroys the political foundation of her own country and then leaves. She accepts to be stateless and tears down another city, all for her passionate adherence to Jason. At the end of her story, she purposefully cleaves her children from her - a kind of radical self-mutilation. Her signature gesture, of making poison that causes clothing to stick and burn, is a form of unnatural cleaving as well. At the foundation of all this violence is a long traditional of art and knowledge upon which Medea draws to effect her cleaving.
The myth points out how difficult it is for us to accept that there are people who walk in the world with another set of knowledge. Underneath the political denegation of Medea, there is an epistemological condescendence. She is regarded as a witch with occult skills. But her knowledge is actually medicine; it is a science (scientia), which operates in powerful ways that the society does not accept. She is a very old character in many ways: her knowledge is an old one, grounded in the gods, and as a mother, she is very old compared to Creuse. She is used up, she is wasted. She embodies that old knowledge that we all carry on with us, but that we don’t revere. The myth shows us that recognizing that different knowledge, respecting and honoring it, would be a way to give people dignity, honor and power. It confronts us to epistemological alterity.
Can you identify some specificities of Corneille’s play among Medea’s rewritings?
In Corneille’s Médée, it is a mistake to see Medea only as a woman and to reduce her to her gender, because she is also a political actor who is addressing the problem of political sovereignty. Her conflictual dialogue with Créon is not just a battle of wits; it is a battle of political theories about justice and individual responsibility.
Corneille chooses to equalize strengths; he refuses a tragedy where one of the characters would be designated to the spectator as a monster. It is not a horror movie. Violence is distributed among characters and profoundly anchored in histories that go well beyond the theatrical present moment of the plateau. Medea is a traveler, she is a migrant. And she is neither incompetent, nor innocent. On the other side, Corneille makes Creon kind of an authoritarian idiot, Jason is like a silly baroque man, Creuse seems materialistic. Taking away Medea’s children and her coat is like ripping her off her skin and her history; it is taking away both her future and her past, and condemning her to be an exile, an errant. By this effort to balance the strength and the violence among the characters, Corneille raises the challenge of showing a woman who kills her children and lives.
Would you have some pedagogical recommendations to address this myth in a French Early Modern Literature course?
I often teach Corneille’s play in relation to another moment, for example to Pasolini or to Lars Von Trier’s Medea, or along with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These tragedies can not be read only in the history of French literature. Their writers and the public experienced them in a much longer history, where Euripides, Ovid and other cultural references were present. Thus, it is crucial to stop thinking of French studies as something that is created with a single romance language or national tradition. We need to uncover and dig through the layers of cultural chauvinism, nationalism, appropriation, and to get rid of the 19th century’s radical or nostalgic representation of the ancien régime.
Also the other important thing to do in teaching Médée is to get people to stand up and recite, not just some of the monologues, but the dialogues, together, and to see what is traded back and forth. Christian Biet taught us to understand the tragedy as an incarnated, embodied genre, where gesture, voice and rhetoric are essential. I always teach French tragedy in relation to the juridical, the predicatory and the civic rhetoric, because I think about the language as performing and enacting.
Tragedy is a site of performance and declamation, but also a site of convincing. For instance, how come we trust Jason in the exposition scene? I always teach students that the notion of credibility is socially and culturally specific. Jason’s credibility does not come from what he saw as an eyewitness, but from who he is: he is noble and beautiful. Corneille sets him up for being a believable person, and it will take time for the spectator to reconsider this impression. His account of Médée’s past is as much testimony as ekphrasis -- the translation of art at work. Whether of art or experience, ekphrasis is one of the most politically powerful gestures you can do: it is to testify of what you see in a way that somebody experiences it from your own side of it. That’s what written plays are: they create an image in your mind so you see something in someone else’s perspective. Corneille puts on stage certain characters trying to impose their view of the narrative, using different levers of credibility and trying to win our conviction. Overall, my goal in teaching tragedy is to allow students to think about these plays as models of social and cultural conflicts, where the answers and the resolution are not entirely clear.
Interview by Justine Le Floc'h, July 2021
Medea’s figure keeps fascinating, as the following CFP (“Médée, la lacération du Care”) for the 8th issue of the K. Revue demonstrates: http://revue-k.univ-lille.fr/contributions.html (English, French & Italian).
Works Cited
Carrière Marie J., Médée protéiforme, Ottawa, Canada, Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2012.
Cavarero Adriana, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, translated by William McCuaig, New York, Columbia University Press, 2011.
Cherbuliez Juliette, In the Wake of Medea: Neoclassical Theater and the Arts of Destruction, Fordham University Press, 2020.
Chevanelle-Couture Aurélie, Médée, mémoire du théâtre : une poétique du mal, 1556-1713, Genève, Droz, 2019.
Kekis Olga, Medea adapted: the Subaltern Barbarian speaks, Master thesis, University of Birmingham, 2010.
Shama Mahbuba Sarker, « Jason and Medea’s Relationship in Medea: A Postcolonial Analysis », Crossings. A Jounal of English Studies, 2017, vol. 8, p. 173‑178.