"Good" Medea

      Let’s not beat around the bush: I talk a lot of smack about Jason. I’ve read the major classical texts that talk about him, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s an irredeemable jerk, and I don’t care who knows it. Now, many of the classical texts that talk about Jason are set up as a conflict (yeah, an India-Pakistan level conflict) between Jason and Medea. Naturally you might assume that I’m on Medea’s side in these conflicts. Well, the truth is that Medea, while much smarter and more competent than Jason and less likely to engage in casually dickish behavior, is a pretty terrible person also--particularly in Euripides’ play, which is the most popular version in America today. She kills her children, first of all, and it’s hard to convey the blackhearted ruthlessness required to kill a small, feeble person who trusts you. And she doesn’t kill them because of any grievance she has against them, any actions they’ve undertaken or words they’ve spoken. She does it because their deaths will make Jason sad, and she feels fully justified in cutting off their lives in service of her revenge. Also, she kills her brother (who might be still a child or might be a full-grown  adult, depending on whose version you’re reading), tears up his body, and scatters the pieces in the Black Sea to make it more difficult for her father to perform a burial. When she meets a man who caused problems for Jason in the past (this is when she still likes Jason), she tricks his loving daughters into dismembering him and boiling up the pieces in a stewpot. And, on a smaller scale, she lies when it suits her, she forces people to make promises that they won’t want to keep, she attempts to kill some people without managing to pull it off, she cheats on her taxes, she likes Coldplay, you get the idea. I admire her strength of character and her ability to get things done, but it’s not like I want her working in my office. Or marrying my brother.

      The funny thing about Euripides, though, is that, while he is the earliest literary source we have on Medea, you can find traces of stories about Medea that predate Euripides. And if you look into those, it becomes obvious that Euripides really bent over backwards to make Medea into the most unsympathetic character possible (anyone else reminded of "Wicked"? ("Who can say if I've been changed for the better?")) while in the earlier sources, she looks more misunderstood than evil. For starters, if you know Euripides’ version, you probably know all about what happens when Jason and Medea arrive in Corinth: Jason is honored as a world-traveled hero and master of the seas, while Medea is despised as a filthy foreigner. The local king offers Jason the chance to marry his daughter and become the next king, pointedly ignoring the fact that Jason already had a wife. But in another version, the story plays out differently: when Medea arrives in Corinth, the locals recognize her as the rightful heir to the throne--in fact, she came to town specifically because they invited her. (There’s a complicated explanation for why this is the case, but you’ll have to look it up separately--I’m not going to draw out all the minutia here.) So Medea herself is the princess Jason married to become king of Corinth. Moreover, she didn’t kill the children--she was trying to make them immortal (something like the story of dipping Achilles in the river Styx) by hiding them in Hera’s temple. This doesn’t work, unfortunately, but before Medea can bring the children home, Jason gets tired of his children disappearing and returns to his hometown. Rather than stay on as queen in her own right, unfettered by her worthless husband, Medea abandons the city--which doesn’t speak well of her commitment to her ancestral privilege. You’ll notice that no one has killed the children yet. But there is a further alternative version that, after Medea is rejected by Jason, she’s driven out of the city. Her children stay in Hera’s temple, where they think they’ll be safe. The Corinthians, still irate at Medea, discover the children and stone them to death--again, not for any crime they’ve committed, but to punish someone else indirectly.

      In other words, if you ignore Euripides and his followers, there is a notable alternative tradition in which Medea is honored as a genuine Greek princess, who is not a shameful burden on Jason but rather the key to his power. Moreover, her intentions toward her children are entirely benevolent, and her failures toward them are refusing to recognize the limits of her magic, and allowing them to fall victim to the violence of other people. Euripides, as you may know, lived in classical Athens, a society notoriously full of diehard misogynists, so it’s little surprise that Medea should be revised into a cautionary tale about the dangers of powerful and intelligent women to their opportunistic and ineffective husbands. I’d encourage everyone to go read (or re-read) Euripides’ play and pay attention to Medea’s aggressive feminism--understanding how this aggression was intended to terrify the audience with the prospect of active women, and how a well-intentioned magician who wanted to make her children immortal has been deliberately twisted into a bogeyman for this purpose.

Objectified Women, Woman-ified Objects

      If you were looking for the ideal parable to illustrate the sexual objectification of women, you don’t have to look any farther than Pygmalion’s statue. The most famous version of her story is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; I was assigned to read it in high school and remember being appalled at this little morality fable. The story, in brief, goes like this. There’s this guy named Pygmalion. And his hometown is full of sluts! Prostitutes, adulteresses, women who have sex outside of marriage! Pygmalion, who has no qualms about judging women solely on the basis of their sexual history, determines that none of these strumpets are worthy of marrying him, and self-righteously adopts a bachelor lifestyle. (I bet he was one of those guys who liked to smugly remind people that he didn’t own a TV.)

      Anyway, all the sluts get their comeuppance when Venus turns them into stone as punishment for their promiscuity, but Pygmalion still doesn’t have a girlfriend--which is the important thing, right? So, in a move that probably made sense when he was drunk and lonely one Saturday night, he decides to build his own girlfriend! That is, he makes an ivory statue of the ideal woman. (As a side note, I have to wonder how big the chest was on this idealized woman. In my experience, men--particularly men who spend an unseemly amount of time thinking about breasts but don’t actually interact with breasts on a regular basis--tend to exaggerate the chest when they depict women, and meanwhile betray their limited understanding of how breasts work.) Okay, well, some lonely guy can’t find a girlfriend in real life, so he settles for an artistic representation of his perfect woman instead--it’s a little sad, maybe, but not particularly strange, maybe not even uncommon. But then Pygmalion gets weirder. He starts buying presents and clothes for the statue. He lays it down on a soft couch and tries to make it comfortable. He talks to it and kisses it and pretends it’s a real woman. In short, he has officially gone off the rails.

      But what counts is that Venus feels bad for him--Venus, the goddess of unrestrained sexuality, someone you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be impressed by this lonesome loser pining away after a paragon, but apparently she is. So one day Pygmalion is enjoying a quiet evening at home with his statue, making out with it as usual, when he realizes that his statue has become a real woman! And not the kind of woman with personality or agency, but his ideal woman: a perfectly passive non-person who will acquiesce to all his whims. Ovid’s story makes clear that Pygmalion pretty much rips her clothes off the second she achieves consciousness, without any concern for her consent. I’ve often wondered what that would have been like for her--she’s essentially just been born, she probably has no understanding of the world around her; all she knows is that this guy is tearing off her clothes and climbing on top of her. It sounds like the most awful sort of rape story. But I don’t think Ovid ever bothered to consider the story from the statue-woman’s point of view; he sympathized with Pygmalion, for whom the whole point of this statue is that he finally has a sexual object who he knows for a fact hasn’t been whoring around with other men.

      Ovid doesn’t say anything about the aftermath of the story except that the statue had a child nine months later. The statue-woman takes no action in the narrative; she is only significant as the recipient of Pygmalion’s sexual attention and the incubator of his children. In fact, she doesn’t even have a name: she’s frequently referred to as Galatea, but that name was invented in the renaissance when Ovid was popular and people wanted to make it easier to talk about this story. Personally, I wonder whether Pygmalion would have ever bothered to give his submissive helpmeet a name, or whether he would have gone on referring to her as “you” and “my wife” forever. Still, I like to imagine what might have happened if Pygmalion hadn’t gotten the woman he ordered, if the statue had turned into a real woman, personality and all, who had opinions about who she wanted to sleep with--and the list didn’t include losers who think statues make good sex toys. A guy as smug and entitled as Pygmalion deserved a surprise like that--although I wouldn’t say that she necessarily deserved him.

ETA: Mark Kalesniko’s graphic novel Mail Order Bride may be the story I was looking for, of a Pygmalion who seeks out a docile and limited wife only to find that she has a personality after all.

 

a cautionary tale

grad school

has changed me

but not

for the better.

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Thanks for checking in. I know it's been quiet around here lately. Check back next Sunday; I plan to get back on a weekly posting schedule. And happy start-of-the-school-year for everyone who's starting fall semester.

O, pankakiste!

      I’ve been wanting to cover Jason for a really long time. Jason gets a bad rap these days, as well he should. I’d love to see The Toast do a “dirtbags” write-up of him. The basics of his story are well known; Euripides’ play Medea is for the most part one big shouting match between Jason and Medea, an ugly breakup scene where the former lovers snipe at each other and argue about who was worse to whom, so Medea is quick to hurl all of Jason’s offenses in his face. To hit the highlights: Jason travels from Greece to the ass-end of the world essentially because someone dared him to; the gods curse Medea (who lives in Ass-End-of-the-World-ville) to fall hopelessly in love with this dubious hero. In the course of winning Jason’s affections Medea ensures that she’ll never be able to go home again, but Jason offers to take her back to his home and protect her. They marry and have a few kids, but Medea is a foreigner, and the Greeks refuse to accept her or recognize the marriage--so a few years on, a king (in a deliberate slight against Medea) offers to let Jason marry his daughter. Suddenly Jason can’t abandon Medea fast enough. When Medea confronts Jason--this is the big shouting match that the audience of Medea gets to listen in on--she tears him apart for going back on his promises to protect her, for abandoning his wife and children in a hostile land, for prompting her to do all the horrible things (burglary, murder, dismemberment) that made her a wanted criminal in her hometown. Everyone hates her in Greece, so she can’t exactly open a Domino’s franchise or go on welfare like an accepted member of society; she has nowhere to go and no way to support herself. Jason, who is much less anxious about the future than Medea, defends himself with a number of questionable arguments, including, ‘Hey, it’s not MY fault you did all those horrible things,’ and (in a classic colonialist argument) ‘But you should be glad you made it to Greece, because you got to enjoy all the benefits of real civilization!’ As you may realize, my sympathies have always been with Medea, and I love the ending, where she remorselessly slays the patriarchy one by one, ascends onto her dragon chariot, and soars off to a grander destiny.

      Anyway, Euripides’ Medea doesn’t present a terribly sympathetic Jason; right at the beginning Medea calls him “pankakistos” (the worst of all, the worst man imaginable), and his characterization easily lives up to that. It’s easy to trash him in an article like this. But Euripides isn’t the only one who writes about Jason, and I thought before I wrote about him I should give Apollonius’ Argonautica a really thorough examination.

      The Argonautica is an epic about the voyage of the Argo, a magic ship in Greek myth (in the Argonautica, the Argo is a speaking character, although she doesn’t speak much--her big line, near the end of the epic, is to announce that Zeus is angry). Jason (something of an aimless youth, and much younger than I expected--when the story opens, he’s just beginning to show a beard) is sent on an errand to the middle of nowhere to recover a certain treasure for no very good reason. Uncertain of what dangers lay in store, and doubtful of his ability to complete the challenge alone, Jason assembles a team of adventurers to help him, each of whom has a specific talent--there’s the one who can run really fast, the one who can see really far, the twins who can fly, the one who can navigate perfectly, and a pile of others; the opening of the epic has a LONG expository section describing what’s so great about each individual. Jason himself is kind of glossed over in this section; his exceptional qualities are unspecified--or, one may suspect, nonexistent. Throughout the work, he’s referred to most commonly as “amechanos” (which means “ineffective” or “useless”), as well as “meleos” and “anenytos,” which have similar meanings--although he is specified to be quite pretty. He’s a delegator. When a challenge arises, he always gets one of his talented underlings to deal with it, and Medea becomes his most powerful underling of all--she has magic powers, and, afflicted as she is with a preternatural love, she’s willing to do anything Jason asks. So she lies, she steals, she murders her brother, she dismembers his body; she’s determined to marry Jason and that means that his mission must succeed at all costs.

      The Argonautica story stops once they arrive back in Jason’s hometown, so we never see how Jason rewards Medea for helping him, whether he will unceremoniously toss her aside as soon as the prospect of wealth and influence appears. Still, the Argonautica was written long after Euripides’ Medea, and given that background it almost seems like the author was trying to make Jason look bad. When Jason and Medea start plotting how to commit their crimes and how to get away scot-free, Jason makes a series of extravagant promises to Medea--promises that the reader knows that Jason is destined to break in Euripides’ version. For someone who knows Euripides, the Argonautica Jason comes off looking untrustworthy and worthless. There’s also a rather emasculating simile applied to Jason after he steals the treasure he wanted: the narrator says that Jason is as excited to get the Golden Fleece as a girl trying on a new dress--bear in mind that making slights against a man’s masculinity is rather a big deal in the author’s time. Reading the Argonautica, you can get the sense that the author doesn’t respect his own protagonist and is just sort of putting up with him. Maybe he was more interested in writing about Medea’s awesome powers, and he resented having to include Jason alongside. Maybe he felt that Medea was such a forceful and awe-inspiring personality that no man could make a conventional marriage with her. (In the afterlife she was supposed to have married Achilles, one of the most forceful--and, in my opinion, implacably petty--personalities in all of Greek myth; I’m glad I never had to sit next to them at an afterlife dinner party.) For whatever reason, Jason certainly comes off poorly throughout the epic. I still would recommend reading the Argonautica--there are some marvelous settings and some spectacular events--but read it for the journey, not for the hero.