When I was writing my dissertation on Medea, I became interested in the problem she has posed for feminist classicists. Here we have a character who murdered in service of Jason's quest and who then killed again in reaction to betrayal by him and to protect her children, killed them as well. I was interested in Medea herself. As I searched for a dissertation advisor, I ran into a wall with the feminist scholars on the faculty of my university. As soon as I explained that I wanted to write about Medea came the assumption: of course, they said, you will be looking at the patriarchy as the issue in her behavior. And when I replied that indeed I was not going to be looking in that direction, but rather at Medea herself and at the meaning intrinsic to her acts and her story, interest in my work evaporated and they declined to serve on my committee. Though long a feminist myself, I had been absent from developments in academic feminism. It had escaped my attention that there were “right” ways and “wrong” ways to study women, both real and mythological, and clearly considering Medea as anything other than a victim of the patriarchy was the “wrong” way.
It is human nature to push away that which we fear or do not like in ourselves. In A Little Book of the Human Shadow, Robert Bly describes the shadow as a bag that we drag along behind us into which we put any “not me” parts, aspects of ourselves we do not want to own or embrace. Each of us is our own version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The further away we push those darker aspects of ourselves, the more primitive they become. Medea exists as shadow in any of us, despite our efforts to see ourselves as civilized, kind, tolerant, reasonable. And like all shadows, she threatens to break out into our lives if we do not work to become conscious of her.
I remember, during the trial of Andrea Yates, the Texas woman who a few years ago drowned her children, hearing the comments of many women who firmly proclaimed that they could not imagine the possibility, under the wildest of circumstances, of killing their own children, not even if they were psychotic. It is threatening to any mother to think that she could kill her children. Yet we know from literature and mythology that this is one aspect, though indeed a dark one, of mothering captured for us in Kali, in La Llarona, in the Wicked Stepmother, and in Medea. Our culture prefers to enshrine motherhood and offers us the Virgin Mary as the very model of the perfect mother. All of the darker aspects and feelings of mothering and mothers are split off into the Stepmother, the Witch, the Other. We place as much distance between ourselves and the Dark Mother as we can and when we see her, we persuade ourselves that she is nothing like us.
As her witness, we sympathize with Medea when she presents herself as victim, when she shows us her pain and suffering over Jason’s betrayal and the loss of her marriage. But she acts out her feelings and in doing so, she creates in us an unease. We feel at once the cheer that she has stuck the knife in Jason so deftly, hurt him so deeply, which arises from our own desires to gain revenge against those who hurt us, and at the same time, repugnance for what she does, as it assails our senses of ourselves as civilized and too nice or sane to do such a thing. It is precisely at this point, where rage and pain and revenge come together, that Medea creates a problem for feminism.
And as I studied feminist version of Medea, by Jackie Crossland in her play, Collateral Damage, and Christa Wolf in her novel, Medea, I found a Medea quite unlike the one we know from Euripides. The rise in anger about male bias and sexism that came with feminism seems to almost require that women be viewed as heroic and always led by angels of their better nature. Certainly, we see this in the feminist Medea, who in becoming less dark also loses much complexity.
Feminist thought has struggled to take into account choices made by characters which are not easily admirable or understandable. In the press to make Medea less dark, she becomes less altogether. As she reveals herself in both Crossland and Wolf, she seems diminished from the woman of the righteous anger in the Euripidean plays. Medea, having glimpsed her shadow in those tellings of her story seems to have retreated from herself and attempted to eliminate altogether her shadowy aspects. But, no powers exist without a dark side, and when they are denied, murderous feelings can become murderous behaviors, leaving us to wonder how long Medea can contain her darkness as she struggles to hold her position as the hapless victim or Cassandra-like whistleblower.
Feminist psychologists, from Nancy Chodorow to Jean Baker Miller, have focused attention on women and relatedness. The assumption is that women ground themselves in relationship and it is from this relatedness that women’s power flows, as opposed to that of men based in action against and/or over others. In the process, women are granted a kind of moral superiority and relatedness is idealized. One can see this implication of moral superiority in work from Miller’s Relational School of psychology, goddess spirituality, and ecofeminists. Women are empathic, caring, related and moral.
And this makes the woman who kills a particular problem because we do not have room in our understanding of women which allows for murderous aggression.
So I have been wrestling with these thoughts in a paper for more than a year now. And just last week, thanks to
DrX, I happened upon a study which seems to demonstrate this reluctance for women to see women as responsible for murder.
The study, done in Sweden, was designed to look at gender bias in legal insanity evaluations.
Forensic psychiatric decision-making plays a key role in the legal process of homicide cases. Research show that women defendants have a higher likelihood of being declared legally insane and being diverted to hospital. This study attempted to explore if this gender difference is explained by biases in the forensic psychiatric assessments. Participants were 45 practicing forensic psychiatric clinicians, 46 chief judges and 80 psychology students. Participants received a written vignette describing a homicide case, with either a female or a male perpetrator. The results suggested strong gender effects on legal insanity judgements. Forensic psychiatric clinicians and psychology students assessed the case information as more indicative of legal insanity if the perpetrator was a woman than a man. Judges assessed offenders of their own gender, as they were more likely to be declared legally insane than a perpetrator of the opposite gender. Implications of and possible ways to minimize such gender biases in forensic psychiatric evaluations need to be thoroughly considered by the legal system.
That sentence I made bold -- Forensic psychiatric clinicians and psychology students assessed the case information as more indicative of legal insanity if the perpetrator was a woman than a man. is what I saw in the feminist Medeas. A reluctance to see in a woman the darkness of the murderer.
It could easily be argued that feminism has redressed the problems of the patriarchal view of women as needing to be contained and kept passive by emphasizing the value of relatedness. As often happens in a reactive movement, however, what emerges is lopsided and what is overlooked is all of the darker aspects of relatedness, or what we Jungians would call its shadow. Having a large capacity for empathy and relationship for intimacy is certainly a gift, but it must be remembered that not all gifts are blessings. This power women carry is both generative and destructive, something the Greeks understood, but which makes us uneasy.
