Audience Uncertainty and Euripides' Medea Author(s): Stuart Lawrence Source: Hermes, 125. Bd., H. 1 (1997), pp. 49-55 Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4477177 . Accessed: 08/10/2014 10:02 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . 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]. Franz Steiner Verlag is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hermes. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 72.20.138.2 on Wed, 8 Oct 2014 10:02:41 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions AUDIENCE UNCERTAINTY AND EURIPIDES' MEDEA In the words of Charles SEGALwriting on the 'Bacchae', Euripides' "' feeling for the tragic antinomies of life"...finds its clearest expression in doubling, the pairing of opposites, and the sliding of opposites into one another'.' Ambiguity and unresolved contradictionare typical of this tragedian. In the 'Bacchae' for example the god Dionysus embodies various polarities: male and female, Greek and foreign, rational and non-rational,agent and victim, god and beast, god and human being. In some sense, literal or figurative, all of these oppositions apply also to 'Medea', and the play is disturbing because the protagonist arouses conflicting responses2.Indeed, Euripides fosters ambivalenceand ambiguitypart- ly through the play's tadvotx and partly at the emotional level by eliciting at different times sympathy or alienation. The spectators (and especially the men) are compelled thereby to view, however reluctantly, Medea's psychology as relevant to their own, although after the infanticide they may feel the impulse to dismiss her as totally alien, as a highly emotional and irrationalbarbarian sorcer- ess who could have nothing in common with a sensible and decent Greek male. Ambivalence and ambiguityare at once to the fore in the prologos where, if the audience entered the theatre expecting to see Medea the exotic criminal, they received essentially (though not entirely) the opposite impression3.The nurse, the tutor and the chorus of Corinthianwomen are all well-disposed towards Medea and severely critical of Jason4. We are informed of her services to him at 1 C. SEGAL,Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides' 'Bacchae', Princeton 1982, 25. SEGALhere quotes F. WASSERMANN,Man and God in 'Bacchae' and 'Oedipus at Colonus', in: Studies presented to David M. Robinson, ed. C. Mylonas and D. Raymond 2, St Louis 1953, 563. 2 'The 'Medea's' harsh effect on the audience is further intensified by the fact that the reactions demanded from them at various points are so turbulently contradictory. Euripides did not simply show his audience complexities; he made them feel them in the confused tumble of their emotional responses to the characters and their actions' (E. A. McDERMOTI, Euripides' Medea. The Incarnation of Disorder, Penn State UP 1989, her emphasis 78). G. H. GELLIE, The Character of Medea, Bull.Inst. Class.Stud. 35, 1988, 19, sees Medea as 'a conglomerate of qualities shaped by various influences into a creature who can fill a stage or a story but was never seen walking down a street.' 3 D. L. PAGE,Euripides. Medea, Oxford 1938, xviii-xxi, thought that Euripides' audience would respond to Medea the foreigner in terms of certain stereotypes. The view has found little favour, but the poet may have counted on the existence of such prejudices and then set about overturning them. E. HALL, Inventing the Barbarian, Oxford 1989, 17, 35 n. 110, suggests that it may have been Euripides who transformed Medea into a barbarian. 4 E.g. 49ff., 82-88, 173ff. This content downloaded from 72.20.138.2 on Wed, 8 Oct 2014 10:02:41 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 50 STUARTLAWRENCE considerablecost to herself, of her subsequentloyal submissiveness as his wife, of her acceptance by the Corinthiansand of Creon's intention to banish her from Corinth. We hear too her heartbrokencries from within the house5. In counter- point to all of this, however, we are reminded that in helping Jason Medea was prepared to go to barbarouslengths, that she is a dangerous and formidable adversary, that she hates her own children, that she may strike down friends indiscriminately with foes and that she is impervious to advice or influence6. These antitheticalideas and feelings merge or alternate.The Pelias affair is cited as a service to Jason, but it is also an instance of Medea's ruthless criminality. Medea's sufferings move us to pity but also alienate us by their almost inhuman excess (she is likened to inanimatenature at 28-29) - and there is the threatto the children7. The technique of Medea's great addressto the chorus (214ff.) is similar. The audience would sympathise with Medea the victim of an extreme situation to the point perhaps of wanting revenge for her sake, but the retaliation intimated is clearly a murder (iaucpovoycpa, 266) of which the audience could not have morally approved.It will not do here to appealto the dictum 'harmyour enemies' because, firstly, the audience's sympathy is too equivocal to count as identifica- tion with Medea, and, secondly, what is in prospectis the killing of a husbandand that for a crime considerably less than Agamemnon's in Aeschylus where the chorus, despite their condemnation of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, are utterly appalled by his wife's deed8. Medea's argumentin this speech creates a furtherunease. In describing the social disabilities of women so readily recognisable to an audience she provides S E.g. 9-15, 31-35, 70-72, 96-98, 143-47. B. GREDLEY,The Place andTime of Victory: Euripides' 'Medea', Bull.Inst.Class.Stud.34, 1987, 27-29, remarkson the importanceof the crvij, or the areabehind it, as the locus of Medea'salienation, from which her emotionsspill out on the stage. 6 E.g. 9, 28f., 36-45. 7 'Medeaherself is presentedin all the alarmingviolence of herpassion, but framed by the sympathyof the Nurseand chorus, and therefore to be seen by the audienceas a victim,even if also as a potentialcriminal'. P. E. EASTERLING,The Infanticidein Euripides' 'Medea', Yale Class.Stud.25, 1977, 181.D. J. CONACHER,Euripidean Drama, Toronto 1967, 187,observes: 'The seriesof emotionstraversed - sympathy,apprehension, horror - anticipatesin a few rapidstrokes the responseswhich, in the same sequence,the comingaction will evoke'. Euripides'use of the mythic sourcesand the questionof the originalityof the deliberate infanticideis discussedby PAGE(n. 3) xxiff. Thequestion of thepriority of Neophron'splay is the subjectof a studyby A. N. MICHELINI,Neophron and Euripides, Medea 1065-80, T.A.Ph.A.119 (1989), 115-35. W. STEIDLE,Studien zum antikenDrama, Munich 1968, 154 n. 16, finds the referencesto Medea's hatredof the childrenfully intelligibleto an audienceonly if they were awareof a priortradition of deliberateinfanticide, whereas T. V. BUTTREY,Accident and Design in Euripides''Medea', AJ.Ph. 79 (1958), 12-14 discussespossible audiencereactions to refe- rencesto the childrenprecisely on the oppositeassumption. 8 Ag. 1399ff. This content downloaded from 72.20.138.2 on Wed, 8 Oct 2014 10:02:41 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions AudienceUncertainty and Euripides'Medea 51 one context at any rate for explaining her later deeds, at least when she appends the exacerbatingfactor of her statusas an exile. There is no attempthere to define her situation by ethnicity or individual temperament,i.e. that she is a barbarian and naturallypassionate,and therefore more likely to kill. If an audience goes with Medea on this, they may well have to think that a Greek woman in this extreme situation might have been capable of similarbloody deeds9.There is no invitation to dismiss Medea as alien to the spectator'spsychology or culture. If an audience experiences a blend of amoral admirationand moral unease at Medea's Odyssean manipulationof Creon and exploitation of his sensitivity to a supplication10,a higher intensityof emotional ambivalenceand conceptualuncer- tainty arises out of Medea's reactions after that scene. In this monologue, which falls into two parts, Medea begins by relishing the fulfilment of her vindictive schemes now spelt out fully for the first time (364-85), at which point it is at least doubtful that the audience are actively supportingMedea ratherthan standing in awe of her singleminded audacity.If they are respondingmorally at all they will condemn a revenge that cuts down the innocent with the guilty. In any event Medea is not here explicable as the representativeGreek or Athenianwoman, and the reference to her skill in drugs (384-85) recalls the tradition of Medea the sorceress11.On the other hand, her determinationto silence the laughter of her enemies puts her in the company of the male heroes of Greek legend and morally on the same groundin principle as such decent men as Plato's Polemarchus12. 9 Euripidesmakes his audienceaware that 'pressuresanalogous to those workingupon Medeaexist in theirown comfortablehomes'. K. J. RECKFORD,Medea's First Exit, T.A.Ph.A.99 (1968), 339. 'Medeais a barbarianwith incalculablepower; she is also an archetypalMarried Wife, and as such an isolated foreigner.This second aspect of Medea, together with the relentlesslyrecognizable portrait of heras a womanwronged, is designedto preventevery man in the audiencefrom comfortably dissociating her from his own Greekspouse'. M. VISSER,Medea: Daughter,Sister, Wife andMother, in: GreekTragedy and its Legacy(ed. CROPP.et al.), Calgary 1986, 152. H. ROHDICH,Die EuripideischeTragodie, Heidelberg 1968, 47f., sees Medea as a 'normal'woman different from the chorusonly in the extremityof her circumstances.