Order 870497: Question on the play Medea, by Euripides

Medea: Hero or Heroine? Author(s): Carolyn A. Durham Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1984), pp. 54-59 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3346093 Accessed: 08-03-2018 05:05 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide

range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and

facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

http://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Nebraska Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies

This content downloaded from 132.234.251.230 on Thu, 08 Mar 2018 05:05:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Medea: Hero or Heroine?

Carolyn A. Durham

Two of the more common assumptions of feminist literary criticism may be both logically consequential and potentially contradictory. That most western literary genres have been essentially male is hardly surprising in a cultural tradition in which masculinity alone has generic status. It follows, then, that women achieve the stature of protagonists only at those times or in those world views in which female experience becomes representative of the human condition. Or does it follow? This argument's implicit contradiction can be seen in Carolyn Heilbrun's and Catharine Stimpson's provocative discussion of theories of tragedy, which they characterize as "largely masculinized. "1 Maintaining that the woman hero (note the masculine) was born "from the author's realization that women at that moment best symbolized the human condition" (p. 65), Stimpson and Heilbrun go on to distinguish the "tragic hero" from the "societal fact"; the former's passion results from the limitations inherent in being human and not from social evil that can be remedied (p. 70). One might well argue that, precisely to the extent that women remain women and therefore heroines, their situation stems from rectifiable social conditions, that they are therefore always "societal facts" and never "tragic heroes." In this context, Medea provides a useful exam- ple. Although she has the central role in three major plays, each representative of a different, dominant western culture, she never achieves the representative stature of the tragic hero. The treatment of Medea in the plays of Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille suggests that the limita- tions associated with women somehow never seem to be

those inherent in being human. The original audience of all three plays would have been

thoroughly familiar with the story of Medea. To succeed in what Adrienne Rich calls the task of "re-vision-the

act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of enter- ing an old text from a new critical direction,"2 feminist criticism must examine the original sources of the legend as well as the way in which each playwright effects its transposition into dramatic form. (There is a certain unavoidable circularity in this procedure, since Euripides represents a key source for the legend itself.) This does not, of course, imply that we can have access to an ideologically neutral account, for to the extent that we must depend upon standard guides to mythology, our information arrives already encoded.3

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Medea enters into myth through the story of Jason and his heroic quest for the golden fleece. To regain the throne of the Greek state Iolcus, usurped by his uncle Pelias, Jason eagerly agrees to recover the golden fleece from King Aeetes of Colchis. In what has passed into collective memory as the oldest story in Greek tradition and the first important maritime adventure, Jason sets sail with the Argonauts, the greatest heroes of Greece. In Colchis, Aeetes agrees to give up the golden fleece if Jason can triumph over the formidable forces that protect it. Whether charmed by Jason, who promises marriage, or by his divine protector Aphrodite, Aeetes' daughter Medea falls in love with Jason and uses her magic powers to allow him to steal the golden fleece. Medea and her younger brother Absyrtus flee with the Argonauts; and in what Thomas Bulfinch calls "another story of Medea almost too revolting to record even of a sorceress, a class of per- sons to whom both ancient and modern poets have been accustomed to attribute every degree of atrocity,"4 Medea assures the escape of the Greeks by killing her brother and scattering his limbs across the water to slow her father's pursuit.

Carolyn Durham teaches French, comparative literature, and women's studies at the College of Wooster where she currently chairs the Women's Studies Program. Durham is the author of L'Art romanesque de Raymond Roussel and has published on feminist issues in Jump Cut, Bucknell Review, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Twentieth Century Literature, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. She is presently working on a monograph of Marie Cardinal.

FRONTIERS Vol. VIII, No. 1 @ 1984 FRONTIERS Editorial Collective

This content downloaded from 132.234.251.230 on Thu, 08 Mar 2018 05:05:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Durham 55

In Iolcus, where Pelias still refuses to surrender the throne, Medea tricks his daughters into murdering him in the belief that his death will lead to his rebirth and

rejuvenation. After Pelias' death, Jason and Medea are forced to flee to Corinth with their two sons; there Jason abandons Medea to marry Creusa, daughter of King Creon. Though, in general, Bulfinch's hostile attitude is common, there exist some sympathetic accounts of Medea, and two important issues are clear in all the sources: Medea acts not for herself but for Jason, and Medea believes that Jason will honor her love and the

actions she performs in its name with the fidelity he has sworn.

All three dramatic versions of the Medea legend are set in Corinth-immediately after the day of Jason's wed- ding to Creusa (Euripides), on the day of the wedding (Seneca), and immediately before the day of the wedding (Corneille). All three dramatists recount Medea's revenge: to repay Jason for his faithlessness, Medea sends Creusa a poisoned robe that destroys both the princess and her father; Medea then kills her own sons and flees to Athens, where King Aegeus has promised her protection. In the basic focus of their interest and in the specific events they choose to dramatize, the three plays are very similar. In- deed, Seneca bases his play on Euripides' version, and Corneille, in accordance with French neoclassical doctrine, borrows from both the Greek and the Roman dramatists.

In all three dramatic versions, Creon's decision to banish Medea determines her vengeance, which takes place during the one-day reprieve Creon grants her. Each includes at least one confrontation between Medea and Jason in which she reminds him of all he owes her and

scorns his efforts at self-justification. The dramatis personae of the plays include both partisans and enemies of Medea, and dramatic tension builds through the con- trasting failure of all attempts to prevent Medea's revenge and the growing strength of her own determination. All three plays end with Jason's despair as Medea trium- phantly displays the bodies of their slain children. Thematically, Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille all deal to some degree with issues centering on love, jealousy, and infidelity; all address the conflict within Medea between her conjugal and maternal love and her desire for revenge; all suggest on some level a political and cultural opposi- tion between Medea and the Greek state or civilization.

Factual differences among the three plays tend to be minor and to center entirely on secondary characters-for example, the presence or absence on stage of the children, of Aegeus, and of Creusa.

Since all three versions of Medea focus on the analysis of the central character, important distinctions among Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille result precisely from the character the three dramatists ascribe to Medea and the

motives they attribute to her actions; these alone deter- mine what her magical powers represent, how her legen- dary past functions, how Jason is portrayed, how the community reacts, and, ultimately, what our attitude toward Medea will be. Differences among the three plays can be and have been attributed to historical and cultural

factors. In the fourth century B.C., Euripides uses Medea to illustrate by contrast the Greek ideal of moderation.

In Seneca, Medea functions as metaphor for the disorder of first-century Rome. In seventeenth-century France, Cor- neille's Medea illustrates the threat an independent, proud, and sanguinary nobility poses to the authority of the state. But despite changes in the conception of what constitutes a human and social being, all three dramatists share a definition that excludes women, however differently. It is these differences and similarities in the dramatic depic- tion of Medea as woman-treacherous daughter, betrayed lover, destructive mother, and powerful sorceress-that I now wish to examine.

Certainly the femaleness of the legendary Medea stands unquestioned, as does the misogynist flavor of this male- authored fable. Medea herself, of course, hates men (curious absence in western languages of a convenient adjective); she is, in fact, homocidal in the gender- particular sense of the term. In an inversion of the com- forting and comfortable myth of Isis as female gatherer and weaver, as savior of the male Osiris, Medea dismembers and scatters in the first place. Not only defined as a killer of men, Medea also incarnates the destruction of the private, domestic, traditionally female world of the family.5 Herself guilty of fratricide and in- fanticide, she arranges parricides through others: Pelias is killed by his own daughters, and Creusa, although un- wittingly, puts on a dress--delivered, moreover, by her newly adopted children-that poisons her father as well as herself. In accordance with the message of the legend, the three dramatic treatments of Medea suggest that it may be a contradiction in terms to speak of a tragic heroine, that women characters who achieve heroic stature in tragedy necessarily reject their femaleness or participate in its devaluation. Medea becomes the central character

in each play to illustrate in turn the destructive plight of women (in Euripides), the destructiveness of women (in Seneca), and the destruction of women (in Corneille).

If the word could ever be taken without moral or emo-

tional connotations, the heroine of Euripides' The Medea might qualify as the most "human" of the three dramatic characters. She is carefully departicularized, stripped of her legendary powers and aura, to become not simply an ordinary woman but, in fact, Everywoman. Up to the point of her crime, Euripides portrays Medea as the stereotypically perfect female within the male power struc- ture of his dramatic universe. In the opening scene of the play, the Nurse characterizes her mistress as the good wife; Medea is supportive, submissive, other-oriented:

She gave Pleasure to the people of her land of exile And she herself helped Jason in every way. This is indeed the greatest salvation of all- For the wife not to stand apart from the husband. (11-15)6

Now abandoned by Jason, "poor" Medea, to be "rightly" female, must necessarily be depicted from both within and without as victim. Euripides underplays Medea's poten- tial for violent revenge in favor of an insistence upon her passivity and helplessness. Much like Racine's Phedre, though without the latter's sense of choice and will, Medea has been reduced to a pitiful, suffering object who desires death:

This content downloaded from 132.234.251.230 on Thu, 08 Mar 2018 05:05:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

56 FRONTIERS

She lies without food and gives herself up to suffering, Wasting away every moment of the day in tears. So it has gone since she knew herself slighted by him. Not stirring an eye, not moving her face from the ground.

(24-27)

Accepting the cultural definition of her rejection as "dishonor," Medea at first predictably cries to other men for assistance: "She calls upon the gods" (22), "calling out on her father's name" (31).

The use to which Euripides puts Medea's magic powers reveals with particular clarity the price a woman pays for an apparently sympathetic presentation as heroine. Originally the source of her superiority, magic becomes in Euripides' "humanized" view of Medea a metaphor for intelligence in a world in which female intelligence is little valued. Medea's response to Creon's admission that he fears her because she is "a clever woman" (281-85) con- firms that she is simply too bright and has failed to con- ceal her sharpness of mind with proper female decorum:

This is not the first time, Creon. Often previously Through being considered clever I have suffered much. A person of sense ought never to have his children Brought up to be more clever than the average. For, apart from cleverness bringing them no profit, It will make them objects of envy and ill-will. If you put new ideas before the eyes of fools They'll think you foolish and worthless into the bargain; And if you are thought superior to those who have Some reputation for learning, you will become hated. I have some knowledge myself of how this happens; For being clever, I find that some will envy me, Others object to me. (292-304)

The male characters in the play express a hatred of women so strong that Jason's insistence that his alliance with Creon "was not because of a woman" (593) appears absolutely convincing. Sadly but more significantly, the female characters in Euripides' world have internalized the negative image that men project upon them. One potentially positive consequence lies in the female soli- darity represented by the Chorus members' total sympathy and support for Medea; their speeches generalize Medea's experience into the female condition of slavery, oppres- sion, and pain. But the Corinthian women of the Chorus in fact covertly support female subservience. Euripides' Medea, virtually free of her legendary violence against Absyrtus and Pelias, becomes criminal only with the murder of her children. The Chorus finds the infanticide alone unacceptable-in fact, absolutely condemnable- and logically so: it is the single act through which Medea denies the female role as men have defined it and as women have accepted it. Note Jason's opposition: "A monster, not a woman" (1342). The play's plea for moderation, constantly reiterated by the female Chorus, discloses its real message: be moderate, be human, be nor- mal; that is, be female-according to the rules laid down by men. It matters greatly then that Euripides' heroine is a woman, and it matters even more that she remain so, but her female characteristics are not elevated as human

values but merely pitied as inevitable limitations on full humanity.

Although in many ways the heroine of Seneca's The Medea contrasts with that of Euripides, she is equally and as necessarily female in a world in which femaleness now openly equals subhumanity or even nonhumanity. Carrying such standard gender traits as emotionalism, irrationality, and capriciousness to their logical conclu- sion, Seneca's Medea acts as an enraged, sadistic beast. Typically, Creon retreats from her as from a wild animal: "Threatening and fierce, she seeks to speak with us; / Attendants, keep her off" (II.ii).7 She is a pure frenzy of passion whose hesitations and abrupt changes of mood bear witness to her almost total loss of self-control. She

is characterized throughout the play as "mad," "reckless," "wild," and it is in a fit of total madness, when she is held in the power of the Furies, that she murders her sons (V.ii). Moreover, Seneca's Medea also incarnates the prin- ciple of cosmic destruction; she seeks to bring down the entire universe with her, to destroy all around her without regard for the guilt or innocence of her victims (III.i), and her behavior is categorically condemned by the moral universe of the Chorus. This conception of Medea deter- mines that of the secondary characters; Seneca's Jason, progressively ennobled as Medea is degraded, represents self-control and reason in the face of Medea's blind

passion. Despite her extension of stereotypically female

characteristics to logical extremes, despite the hatred and fear she arouses, Seneca's Medea might, in her isolation and in her very exaggeration, have been seen as more individual than female. But, in fact, Seneca's very devalua- tion of Medea's femaleness, her so-called "madness," leads to what I think must be a unique insight for a male author and the period. Seneca's Medea is not only rebellious as male-defined but also authentically revolu- tionary. Seneca implicitly equates female innocence not with freedom from crimes against men but with freedom from men themselves. Medea's last crime repeats her first; the killing of her son becomes an explicit act of expia- tion for the murder of her brother, and, more remarkably, the repetition produces literal erasure. Medea regains her virginity and the lost paradise of her girlhood by the total destruction of the wife and mother within her:

I have regained now my crown and throne, My brother and my father; Colchians hold The golden fleece; my kingdom is won back; My lost virginity returns to me!

(V.iii)

This is an excellent example of virginity in Annis Pratt's sense: "a form of negative emancipation in the freedom to reject the forfeiture of the self to patriarchal demands- by suicide, if necessary."8 Yet however perceptive this par- ticular insight-or perhaps precisely because of it- Seneca views Medea's female destructiveness as directly responsible for the unhappiness of men and for the chaos of the world. Indeed, in the final lines of the play, Jason confirms that Medea has brought about the total dissolu- tion of the patriarchal order: "Go through the skies sublime, and in thy flight / Prove that where thou art borne there are no gods" (V.iii).

I think few readers would argue for Medea's experience

This content downloaded from 132.234.251.230 on Thu, 08 Mar 2018 05:05:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Durham 57

in Euripides or Seneca as metaphorical of the human con- dition; rather, it represents a particular male view of a specifically if not uniquely female situation. At first sight, Corneille seems to have rejected such gender-specific interpretations to raise his Medea to universal stature; it is indeed, however, a question of ascension, for Corneille's Medea will have to be superhuman to qualify for the masculinity that alone can guarantee her humanity. Even so, Medea's physical femaleness may have lessened

critical interest in Corneille's first tragedy. In spite of the largely successful efforts of twentieth-century critics to reconstitute Corneille's theater in its entirety, his Medea has remained largely ignored. For example, Medea and its companion piece, The Golden Fleece, are the only plays omitted from Serge Doubrovsky's otherwise comprehen- sive study of the Cornelian hero.9 This and other such oversights stem from the common centering of critical inquiry on the nature of the male protagonist. Yet Medea stands clearly as the prototype of the Cornelian hero, the first of a long line of central heroic figures, most of whom will be men. 10

Medea already illustrates the primary values of Cor- neille's heroic universe: unity of word and action; crea- tion and cult of the self; surhumanity, defined against the natural. Medea opposes efficacious action to the sterile complaints of the other characters. She is able to keep her word, to accomplish what she has announced. Medea acts alone; she is self-sufficient in the fullest sense of the term; and she preaches revolt in response to Jason's pleas for submission. Her two accounts of the winning of the golden fleece, echoing with "me" and "I alone" (II.ii; III.iii),11 constitute an autocelebration. Medea's constancy symbolizes faithfulness to the self; her continued love for Jason results not from the self-alienation in the face of

irrational passion so common in Racine's heroines but from a recognition of and insistence on her own identity.

Corneille's Medea first defines herself as hero(ine) against the nonheroic world of the male characters who surround her. In an inversion of sex roles, Jason represents the "feminine" principle of passivity. In the face of Medea's active energy, he preaches submission: "let us yield to fortune" (III.iii.881). His willingness to adapt to circumstances leads directly to his "feminine" fickleness, his inconstancy. Jason's very thought processes-his am- bivalence about his own motivations; the contradictions in his multiple explanations of his actions, ranging from Creusa's beauty to political necessity to paternal love; the continual shifting and confusion of his argument-reflect the constant metamorphoses of his sense of self. Male sexuality has always been metaphorically allied with masculine power, and Jason's is no exception. But Jason pursues position and power through a goal that is tradi- tionally the resort of women-marriage. All Medea's sorcery does not permit her to act on Jason's heart and will; ironically, the weak and cowardly Jason has precisely this most "magic" and most female of powers: Jason "is born only to charm princesses" (I.i.22); he is an "infamous sorcerer who charms minds" (II.v.680).

Since Corneille's sympathies undeniably lie with Medea, and since the traits that make up her strength-autonomy, rebellion, efficacy, constancy-are clearly unexpected in

a woman, we might think that we have here the "reassess- ment in woman's favor of the relative capacities of the sexes" that Ian MacClean considers a workable defini-

tion of feminism for the seventeenth century.12 But, in fact, Corneille has merely transposed masculine characteristics onto female characters and feminine

characteristics onto male characters, while continuing to value the former alone. As Medea and Creusa define

themselves through the individual identity and auton- omous action normally associated with men, Jason and Creon define themselves as women traditionally have, through passivity and relationships with others. Medea's qualifications as heroic and universal thus depend upon her masculinization, dangerous in and of itself, and upon her denial of a femaleness that is degraded and devalued elsewhere in the play.

Given the rejection of nature as a central tenet of Cor- neille's theory of the superhuman hero, woman's tradi- tional identification with the world of the natural may well have made her the logical choice to serve as the original illustration of his doctrine. Medea's magic powers, which "force nature" (IV.v.1246) and "hold nature enslaved" (III.i.706), function initially as a metaphor of this conception of heroism. But more importantly, Cor- neille's reversal of sex roles also permits him to illustrate conveniently the problematical character of heroism, the potential destructiveness of the strong-willed individual, without needing to condemn masculinity in the process. Corneille focuses the necessarily unnatural and therefore monstrous aspects of his conception of heroism on the female realm of Medea's life: her roles as daughter, sister, and mother. Medea herself stresses that her own unnatural

acts, her willingness to betray her father and to kill her brother, and not her magic powers, were the essential fac- tors in the successful quest for the golden fleece:

If I had then limited my desire to my duty, If I had preserved my glory and my faithfulness, If I had felt horror at so many outrageous crimes, What would have become of Jason and all your

Argonauts? (II.ii.431-34)

Medea's ultimate act of heroism results in the murder of

her children.13 Thus, Corneille manages to have it both ways: when Medea is masculine, she is good, but when she is bad, even though this results only from carrying male characteristics to an extreme, she becomes female again.

The legendary Medea is, of course, remembered first as a mother. Even though Corneille underplays his heroine's direct involvement with her children far more

than do Euripides and Seneca, his play may still in fact be the one most directly concerned with Medea as mother. Her motherhood is first of all literal. For Medea to be

authentically heroic-and authentically monstrous-she must love the children she sacrifices. Without a clear and

deep bond of affection to overcome, no heroic test and no act against nature would occur. In Seneca, where Medea carries out the murders in a fit of madness, they lose all heroic and moral meaning.14 Corneille takes two innovative steps in his Medea to insure our interpretation

This content downloaded from 132.234.251.230 on Thu, 08 Mar 2018 05:05:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

58 FRONTIERS

of the murders as an heroic act. In both Euripides' and Seneca's versions, Medea herself requests the right to leave her children in Corinth. In Corneille's version, the children are taken away by Medea's enemies, an act she sees as a mutilation of her own self:

Barbarous humanity, that tears me from myself, And feigns gentleness to take from me what I love! If Jason and Creusa have so ordered it, Let them return the blood I gave my children.

(II.ii.497-500)

Corneille's greatest originality is to make Jason plan to kill the children. Because this intention is based on his

identification of Medea's only vulnerable spot-"Let the sorceress begin to suffer in you / Let her first torment be to see you die" (V.v.1535-36)-it focuses our attention on her maternal love at the very moment when she is murdering her sons.

But Medea's motherhood is also metaphorical. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the Attic for a literary interconnection between maternity, monstrosity, and creativity. Medea's fearful powers originate in her "grotto," the witch's cave whose womb shape makes it the central seat of female power. For Gilbert and Gubar, maternal creativity represents the "sexual/artistic strength that is the female equivalent of the male potential for literary paternity."15 Medea is a storyteller, and the tale she recalls of her role in the con- quest of the golden fleece deals essentially with the female power to generate male success. The speech itself contains a curious abundance of generative vocabulary--"to sow," "sterility," "fertile," "brought forth," "sown," "gave birth" (II.ii.409-50)-and it ends with Medea's willingness to accept her past crimes in the clear role of mother: "In short, all your heroes owe life to me" (II.ii.441). More importantly, it would seem at first that Medea's mater- nal creativity is not merely the equivalent but, for once, the metaphor of literary creativity. Theatrical producer, director, and playwright, Medea views her revenge as a spectacle staged for her own pleasure: "I must create a masterpiece" (I.iv.253). This is the principal reason why, at the risk of offending classical doctrine and taste, Creon, Creusa, and Jason must all die on stage: "I am not" avenged, if I do not see the result; / I owe my anger the joy of so sweet a spectacle" (IV.v.1276-77).

But female power is viewed as destructive. Medea uses for her own purposes that most maternal power of life and death over men. Moreover, while Medea originally seems to possess the essential literary power of naming, symbolized by her magic-"Fire obeys me, and I control the waters; / Hell trembles, and the heavens, as soon as I name them" (III.iii.908-09)-this most male of rights will prove as always to be denied to women.16 Medea is asked to be quiet and to forget what Jason owes her, to exhibit in fact "aphasia and amnesia-two illnesses which symbolically represent (and parody) the sort of intellec- tual incapacity patriarchal culture has traditionally re- quired of women."17 Medea understands clearly the link between silence and submission:

Nerine, after that you wish me to keep quiet!

Shouldn't I also appear pleased, Shouldn't I wish for the happy day of the royal wedding, And turn all my attention to serving his love?

(I.v.301-04)

Medea knows as well that the power of language stands on the side of the law. Her ironic response to Jason acknowledges the male prerogative to define terms at will, to rewrite the past-metaphorically represented by his constant shifting of ground-even as she mocks it:

I have only been banished! oh sovereign goodness! Then it's a favor, and not a penalty! I have received a pardon instead of a punishment! And I owe thanks again for my exile! Thus the brigand, his miserly thirst once satisfied, Attributes the sparing of our lives to compassion; When he doesn't slaughter, he believes he has pardoned, And what he doesn't take away, he thinks he has given.

(III.iii.833-40)

Medea's efforts to write her own story, that is, the story of her quest for self-definition,18 fail as she is obliged to become the Medea whose image Jason and Creon project. Things will now be as men have named them; notably, Creusa takes into death the name of Jason's wife: "Farewell: give me your hand; that, in spite of her jealousy / I may carry off to Pluto the name of your wife" (V.v.1497-98).

Creon and Jason wish Medea to accept the role of scapegoat, to assume all of Jason's crimes so that he may stand cleansed and innocent:

Give him back his innocence by going away from here; Bear to other regions your insolent anger; Your herbs, your poisons, your pitiless heart, And all that ever made Jason guilty.

(III.ii.467-70)

Ultimately, Medea agrees. In so doing, she adopts a role that Judith Fetterly has identified as traditionally female. 19 There is a sense, as we have seen, in which, by becoming a murderess, Medea accedes to subjective responsibility for her identity; but it is hardly liberating- particularly for a woman-to become what others- particularly men-say that she is. Medea allows herself to be "killed into image" (in the words of Gilbert and Gubar), to become safely "constant" through her accep- tance of a male vision of herself.20 Jason regains his lost memory to promise Medea a fixed portrait in exchange for his freedom:

Your virtuous love is my greatest glory; I would betray myself should I put it out of my mind; And my love for you, which remains eternal, Leaves you the solemn vow in this farewell. May my head shatter under the sharpest arrows That the most bitter anger of the great gods shoots out; May they join together to punish me, If I do not surrender my life before your memory!

(II.iii.33-40)

In Medea Corneille appears to value maleness, even if incarnated in women, and devalue femaleness, even if

This content downloaded from 132.234.251.230 on Thu, 08 Mar 2018 05:05:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Durham 59

represented by men. When he returns to the Medea legend twenty years later in The Golden Fleece, he has changed his mind about the behavior to be valued. He now une-

quivocally backs the relational female traits disparaged in his earlier Medea and defends Jason's solution of

passivity and love against the Argonauts' reactionary belief in action and merit. In the prologue to the play, the individualistic hero whose self-realization comes at

the expense of others' happiness is condemned as destruc- tive, and a symbolic France repudiates victory and replaces war with marriage. But these newly valued qualities are embodied by Jason, a male character, and not by the female protagonist the Stimpson-Heilbrun theory would have predicted.

The assumption that women can achieve the stature of protagonists in masculine genres-or, at least, the assump- tion that they can achieve such stature with any frequency-may be too optimistic. So long as human traits are distinguished by gender, it may well be that no character, either male or female, can be generic, regardless of how writers or readers have tried to use them. So long as Medea is subhuman or superhuman, so long as her humanity comes only at the price of her autonomy, so long as we equate her humanity with mediocrity or with masculinity, the significance of both her gender and her humanity is lost to us. Perhaps only with the creation of a gender-free value system can we really have a tragic female hero, and only then will her femaleness no longer matter.

NOTES

1. Carolyn Heilbrun and Catharine Stimpson, "Theories of Feminist Criticism: A Dialogue," in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Josephine Donovan (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1975), p. 67.

2. Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," College English, 34 (October 1972), 18.

3. My discussion of the story of Jason and Medea draws upon Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1942); and Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch's Mythology, ed. Edmund Fuller (New York: Dell, 1959).

4. Bulfinch, p. 113. 5. According to Ann Jones (Women Who Kill [New York: Fawcett

Columbine, 1981]), this is generally true of homocidal women: "Unlike men, who are apt to stab a total stranger in a drunken brawl or run amok with a high-powered rifle, we women usually kill our in- timates.... The story of women who kill is the story of women" (pp. xv-xvi).

6. Euripides, The Medea, trans. Rex Warner, in Euripides I, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955). All quotations are from this edition.

7. Seneca, The Medea, trans. Ella Isabel Harris, in An Anthology of Roman Drama, ed. Philip Whaley Harsh (New York: Rinehart, 1960). All quotations are from this edition.

8. Annis Pratt, "The New Feminist Criticism," College English, 32 (May 1971), 876. One might argue that Medea's original murder of Ab- syrtus simply represents with particular horror the shifting of allegiance from father to husband required of women.

9. Serge Doubrovsky, Corneille et la dialectique du htros (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).

10. Recent articles by William Goode ("Me'de'e and Jason: Hero and Nonhero in Corneille's Me'de' French Review, 51 [1978], 804-15) and Andre de Leyssac (Introduction, Me'd6e [Gen'eve: Droz, 1978]) examine Medea as the prototype of the Cornelian hero.

11. Pierre Corneille, Theatre complet, ed. Maurice Rat, 3 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1966). All quotations from Medea are from Volume 1 of this edition; all quotations from The Golden Fleece are from Volume 3. Translations are my own.

12. Ian MacClean, Woman Triumphant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. viii.

13. One is reminded of Ellen Harold's criticism of Emma Peel, heroine of the British television series "The Avengers": "What is truly sad is that, though she is equal to a man and superior to most men, the measure of her competence is a strictly macho one-her capacity for violence" (cited in Donovan, p. 21).

14. Euripides also makes of the infanticide a conscious, intentional act: "I know indeed what evil I intend to do" (1078).

15. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 97.

16. See, for example, Julia A. Sherman and Evelyn Torton Beck: "Women constitute an enormous, historically submerged group of peo- ple, deprived of the power to conceptualize, to name, and to categorize reality" (The Prism of Sex [Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1979], p. 4); and Mary Daly: "It is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God" (Beyond God the Father [Boston: Beacon Press, 1973], p. 8).

17. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 58. 18. For Gilbert and Gubar, this is the most often repressed of literary

plots (p. 76). 19. Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to

American Fiction (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1978), p. xii. 20. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 17.

This content downloaded from 132.234.251.230 on Thu, 08 Mar 2018 05:05:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms