Musings on Medea Amy Gibson, M.F.A
Grief Lessons is the collective title Anne Carson chose for her recent translation of Euripides. Writing during the Peloponnesian Wars, Euripides chose women as the tragic center of several plays. Grief was women’s business, their territory. Hecuba and the other wives and daughters of Troy watch as their male children are systematically killed. The women’s fate is equally horrible: given as slaves and concubines to the victors, they are packed onto ships and removed to live out their lives in Greece. Medea faces a different fate, but an equally feminine one. She and her two small children are abandoned by Jason, who has chosen a younger woman. She had given all for him, having betrayed family and country in order to secure his winning of the golden fleece. Alone in a new land and feared as a witch, Medea lashes out, killing the new wife, the King, and her own children with Jason. He is left alive to remember, a broken man, while she quits the stage, the seeming winner in a game of power and betrayal. Lars Von Trier’s 1988 Danish film, shown at MSATCW this fall, looks coldly at this story. The setting is a barren, rocky coastline with raging wind and waves. Jason’s marriage is clearly political, brokered by emissaries in a series of dank caves. The new wife uses her body as a bargaining chip, denying herself to Jason until he banishes Medea and his children to the wasteland beyond the kingdom. The children are Medea’s principal weapon, and filmmaker Von Trier shrouds her as a warrior in stiff, black fabric. Even her hair, symbol of womanhood, is helmeted under a black skull-cap, as if she is steeling herself against womanly emotion. At the start of the film, she emerges from beneath lapping waves fully dressed and gasping, a dark column of grief after a possible suicide attempt. Throughout the film her face is a controlled mask of rage and sorrow. Is there a greater taboo than infanticide? Women and men alike shudder at the thought, yet it happens not infrequently. Von Trier films the children’s murders unflinchingly. They are hanged on the only vertical structure in the landscape, in the only sunlight of the film, with the youngest struggling and crying, and the oldest, actually encouraging the mother to do what she must, helping her kill his brother and submitting wordlessly himself. Religious historian Karen Armstrong sees Medea’s crime as logic gone terribly wrong, her reason used as a tool against natural emotion. The last images of the film show Jason, the camera angled above him, running back and forth in a square of hair-like meadow, unable to escape the events he precipitated. He becomes the suicide foreshadowed at the beginning of the film. Medea is on a ship bound for her homeland, headgear finally removed, her long, thick, dark hair blowing in the wind as she succumbs to grief, her face finally crumbling. I remember a story my mother told me of her youth. In her very first job, she worked as a clerk in my grandfather’s law office. He had agreed to defend a woman who had killed her child. His first act was to send my mother, not much more than a teenager herself, into the jail to give the woman, a pariah in the community, necessary personal items. My mother said the woman was grief stricken. In those days in our county, women were not allowed into the courtroom, so my mother never saw the trial, but my grandfather convinced the twelve male jurors to mitigate the woman’s punishment. Von Trier ends his verbally spare film with words on the screen: “A human life is a journey into the darkness where only a god can find the way, for what no man dares believe, God can bring about.” The original Danish is in all-caps, a tantalizing play on the word “god.” How should one read these words? How can anything good come from such a crime? Is there a Christian message in this pagan tale? My mother remembered that her father told her the woman in the cell should be treated with compassion. He wept in the courtroom as he pleaded for her life, his colleagues said.
Works Cited Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. 254-5. Euripides. Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides. Trans. Anne Carson. New York: New York Review Books, 2006.
Amy Gibson teaches English at Huntingtown High School in Calvert County, Maryland.  She is a former faculty member of Mercy High School in Baltimore.  In the Fall of 1996 she presented a reading of her poetry at MSATCW. Her work has been published in America, The Ohio Review, and Poetry Northwest, among others.

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