Victorian Medeasthe convergence of class, gender and racial politics in literary rewritings of the classical myth

Abstract

Introduction. The behaviour of the classical Euripidean Medea who, abandoned by Jason, kills her children and escapes unpunished remains a mystery to human understanding. After she betrays her Colchian family to help Jason to get the golden fleece and runs away with him to Corinth, Medea becomes an alien in Greece. Once shunned by Jason and by the Greek patriarchal and xenophobic society, she is to be deprived of her children too and left nowhere, as a vagrant. However, her status and her specific conditions do not seem to justify her appalling actions. The reasons for her murders must be searched for in the divine world: as a semi-goddess Medea is accompanied by the barbarian gory gods that exert the divine justice which rules that oath-breaker Jason must be punished and sentenced to live without descendance. Filicide is thus an inevitable consequence of Jason’s behaviour. . Contents of the research This dissertation analyses Victorian mythopoeias which recapture the story to retell Medea’s infanticidal episode proving the long-lasting fascination with the myth and its versatility to address the specific social preoccupations of the Victorian period. My dissertation looks at four Victorian rewritings of the myth of Medea: Ernest Legouvé’s tragedy Medea (1855), which I analyse from the lens of feminist jurisprudence criticism; Robert Brough’s burlesque Medea (1856), which I discuss considering the notion of heterotopia; Augusta Webster’s dramatic monologue “Medea in Athens” (1870), which I study as an example of a feminist version of the myth; and Amy Levy’s closet drama Medea (1882), a version which I explore through the perspective of postcolonial theories. My central argument is that the four Victorian writers use their respective cultural capital to create new versions which serve as literary sites of struggle to question power relations and social norms operating in Victorian society. Medea becomes the embodiment of those racial, class and gender struggles and her story is adapted by each author according to their own specific agendas. Victorian Britain was undergoing multiple changes due to the growing industrialization and the new liberal ideas spread across the western world. Marxism, the 1848 European revolutions, and the emerging feminist movements bolstered Victorian writers’ socio-political initiatives. . Conclusions In these works, the otherness of the mythical woman is manifested in her triple subaltern condition as a marginalised woman, a foreigner and as poor abandoned mother, which highlights the situation of many Victorian women and the authors’ struggle to fight against the inequalities affecting these women, and even themselves. Because these Victorian Medeas are discriminated under very different and intersecting grounds, I read my primary texts employing a multidisciplinary approach, which combines myth criticism, cultural studies, feminism and postcolonialism. My aim is to elucidate how these Medeas fight against the multiple forms of domination affecting them. My reading attempts to shed light on the potential power which is granted in these works to marginalised subjects, and most especially Victorian women, in a society which was changing rapidly.