Notes
A first version of this essay was delivered at the 2013 annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States. It could not have reached its present form without detailed suggestions from two anonymous readers and IJCT’s editorial staff. It is dedicated to my mother, Mary Sue Eldon, who recommended I read Salvage in December 2012.
A related perspective emphasizes ‘the personal voice’ in classical scholarship: see Hallett and Van Nortwick (1996).
Cf. Hallett (2013: 132) on “the value and impact of individual experiences and lived realities, and … human emotions that shape not only experience and reality but also research inputs and outcomes.”
Walters (2007: 11).
Ibid. (2007: 11, emphasis added). For Morrison see below, n. 13.
(2006: 109), after Heyman (1995).
2006: 14 and 3, respectively.
Such issues are addressed more directly in Reaped, focusing on the often-violent deaths of young men, including Ward’s brother.
For the classics and Beloved see Roynon (2013: 82-92), Walters (2007: 106-112), Otten (1998), Kimball (1997), Haley (1995), Schmudde (1993), and Corti (1992); Morrison more generally: Roynon (2013), Walters (2007: 99-132), including attention to Home (e.g., Roynon (2013: esp. 117-127)) and Miner (1985). On Morrison and Margaret Garner see Roynon (2013: 81 and 84); generally Weisenburger (1998); cf. Malamud (2011). Some connections between Beloved and Salvage are noted below.
Cf. Du Bois’s chapters V, comparing the city of Atlanta to the mythic Atalanta (55), and XIV, rewriting Plato’s allegory of the cave (Rep. 7.514a-521b; see (1989: 352-354)). On Du Bois and the classics see Tatum and Cook (2010: 93-154, with 126-134 on the Golden Fleece) and Broderick (1958). On Cullen's Medea see Tatum and Cook (2010: 148-154, with 141-148 on his classicism generally), Rankine (2006: 94-103), Corti (1998), and Dorsey (1969). On Medea as a woman of color see Davis (2015), de Paiva dos Santos (2015), Wetmore (2013) and (2003), McDonald (1975). Cf. O’Meally (2007).
Locke (2013). On Persephone’s reception by African-American women authors, see, e.g., Tatum and Cook (2010: 346-375), Walters (2007: 68-97, 112-132, and 150-170), and Hayes (1994); in other contemporary work, e.g., Hurst (2012). For resonance between Salvage and Rita Dove’s Persephonic Mother Love see below, n. 43. Salvage should also be read in context of contemporary women’s writing and classical reception (Theodorakopoulos (2012)).
Moynihan (2015) makes a similar argument about Salvage’s politicized rereadings in terms of ‘recycling,’ with special reference to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which Esch has read for school (Salvage 7). I am grateful to an anonymous reader for the reminder that Faulkner’s title comes from Homer (Od. 11.424-426). Ward’s ‘salvage’ or ‘recycling’ could be compared to the ancient practice of ‘recomposition,’ with McGill (2005; 31-52 on Medea).
Rankine (2006: 15 and 33).
In Esch’s reading, Hamilton’s sixth chapter, called ‘Eight Brief Tales of Lovers,’ “leads into the story of Jason and the Argonauts” in such a way as to make that story, too, chiefly a love-story (7). Cf. Apollonius Arg. 4.423-425, emphasizing Aphrodite.
Esch saying “I was beloved” evokes Morrison’s novel, whose reception of Medea has also been read as “re-imagin[ing] what precipitates [the] decision to commit infanticide”: “Medea is recast not as the malicious wife who mercilessly kills her children, but as a victimized slave who desperately tries to protect her brood” (Walters (2007: 107 and 109)).
A potentially surprising omission is Medea’s ethnic identity: although her status as outsider and barbarian was of persistent interest in ancient sources, in Salvage she is identified as a “Greek” (e.g., 17, 32). Cf. Graf (1997: 27): “What mattered to [Apollonius] before all else were the impulses within Medea’s soul--and they, of course, could not be allowed to seem exotic,” in context of how Jason’s linked story “long ago moved away from any possible ritual context in order to become the stuff of Panhellenic epic” (42); cf. Od. 12.70, where the Argo is described as “of interest to all” (πᾶσι μέλουσα).
Esch’s father gets badly injured in parallel to a puppy being killed by China:“[t]he meat of his fingers is red and wet as China's lips” (130). Given Skeetah’s identification with Jason, does their father recall Jason’s father Aeson, who in some ancient stories is mutilated?
In a plot culminating in the arrival of a hurricane, in parallel to the death of Medea’s brother during her flight by sea, water means danger; cf. 216, “water meant death,” and see further below.
For Esch’s rereading cf. 216 and 225 (both below, section IV).
As noted above, Esch is aware of Hamilton's attention to “different versions” (Salvage 154; cf. Hamilton 175). Although Salvage does not name any ancient author, Hamilton draws on Apollonius (primarily: “the whole story of the Quest”), Pindar (a bit: “the part about Jason and Pelias”), and Euripides (a larger bit: “what Jason and Medea did” in Corinth; all 160). For summaries of ancient Medea stories see, e.g., Green (1997: 21-30) and Hunter (1989: 12-15).
Preceding three quotations from Hunter (1989: 18-19).
“The idea of love as a wind is found already in archaic poetry” and then frequently later, per Hunter (1989: 204 ad 967-72). Green (1997: 18) notes that “[t]he erotic element” in the Medea story “can be traced back as early as the first quarter of the sixth century” (with 28 on Apollonius' “modernizing psychological portrait”).
Hunter (1989: 203) astutely compares the stillness of Jason and Medea to the paralysis afflicting Daphne upon her transformation into the laurel tree (torpor gravis occupat artus; Ovid Met. 1.548). Esch compares herself to Daphne (Salvage 16).
Virtually the same tree-simile appears later in Apollonius to describe the “earthborn men” who arise from the dragon's teeth (3.1375-1376). For the “fierce gale” (ἀνέμοιο κατάικες) cf. the identical phrasing at 1.1187-1205.
For other examples of tree-imagery in Ward see Reaped 247 and 249; cf. Salvage 254.
It would be interesting to consider how the literary history behind Apollonius’ simile, stretching back to Homer, might help us read Salvage. E.g., Homer Il. 12.131-134 and Od. 6.162-167, but “[t]he comparison of people to trees is a common one” (Hunter 1989: 204 ad loc., referring to Pease ad Virgil Aen. 4.441).
“[W]eather, the sea, and seafaring” are “common [sc. areas for figurative language] in much of classical Greek poetry” (Mastronarde 2002: 35); for parallels to the passages from Euripides noted below see Page (1938 ad locc.). Thus Apollonius, who treats the voyage of the Argo, naturally refers to ‘hurricanes,’ ‘windstorms,’ ‘squalls,’ etc., e.g., 1.1016 (θύελλαι), 1.1078-1152 (ἄελλαι at 1078; ἐριώλας at 1132), 2.1125 (ἄελλαι). Medea uses wind-imagery to emphasize her desire that Jason not forget her (3.1113-1114). In this connection another useful set of comparisons for Salvage would be fictions about storms (e.g., Natasha Trethewney’s Beyond Katrina, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God).
Cf. 1075, where Medea apostrophizes her children’s breath. This would seem to evoke Medea's changed feelings, formerly passionate love and now conflicted motherhood: in the same scene she strongly implies her decision to kill her children (1078–1080).
Cf. Ward's description of the death of her brother Joshua (Reaped 242): “the terror that I will forget who he was … pulls me down further, until I am stuck … in a quagmire of quicksand, mired in the cold, liquid crush, and then: drowning.”
The phrase ‘black Athena’ recalls the title of Bernal (1987), which sought to show African origins for classical motifs and themes, but Esch’s usage here seems mainly to compare her thought about her baby to the mythological birth of Athena from Zeus’ head.
Cf. how their father's voice is drowned out (129) in a way that leads to his physical harm (130, discussed above).
China does not harm her litter at first: Esch has “never seen her so gentle” as with her newborns (Salvage 17). At one point Skeetah mercy-kills a sick puppy: although “his hands” are “as sure as mama's” (52) when she would kill a chicken on a special occasion (51), this too represents displacement of violence from the mother, and her children are not the object.
Reaped has a similar running theme of misogyny and violence in men being matched by cruelty and mistrust in women (e.g., 158, 162, 169); see further below on Salvage 250.
Mastronarde (2002: 64 and 20-21; see further 50-53 for controversy over prior traditions and 57-64 for the possibility that Euripides drew on Neophron). Cf. Green (1997: 29): “the iconographic evidence … largely ignores Medeia as Kindermörderin till the Roman period.” Other versions of Medea’s story omitting the infanticide include 19th-century burlesques (with Macintosh (2000)); cf. Derek Walcott’s Omeros, omitting Odysseus’ killing of the maidservants; I am grateful to an anonymous reader for this point.
Cf. Walters (2007: 36): Hamilton “underscores the fact that Medea’s motive for killing her sons is not about revenge but rather about protecting her children …. Medea realizes that she has no choice but to kill her sons because they would not be safe in Corinth.” Walters suggests that this “reworking of Medea’s story probably served as the inspiration for Morrison’s Beloved.”
To “mother with large, merciless hands” cf. Reaped 203: “the inexorable push of my mother's hands”; I think of Bill Withers’s song ‘Grandma’s Hands.’ Ward’s phrasing echoes Rita Dove’s Mother Love; e.g., Dove has Persephone “cr[y] out for Mama, who did not / hear. She left with a wild eye thrown back,” a Demeter-figure who “left us singing in the field, oblivious / to all but the ache of our own bent backs”: this anticipates Ward’s description of Katrina as a “murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive … left us a dark Gulf … [and] left us to salvage” (Salvage 255, discussed below). On Dove see Steffen (2001).
Cf. Esch’s description of “world-uprooting mothers” alongside other “women who kept me turning the pages: the trickster nymphs, the ruthless goddesses” (Salvage 15-16).
Is there also a Tempest element to Salvage’s depiction of contemporary life, with people continually ‘washed ashore’?
Works Cited
Austin, R. G. 1955. P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Boedeker, Deborah. 1997. “Becoming Medea: Assimilation in Euripides.” In Clauss and Johnston, eds., pp. 127–48.
Broderick, Francis L. 1958. “The Academic Training of W. E. B. DuBois,” The Journal of Negro Education 27.1: 10–16.
Buschendorf, Christa. 1997. “White Masks: Greek Mythology in Contemporary Black Poetry.” In Ickstadt, ed., pp. 65–82.
Campbell, Jane. 1986. Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History. Knoxville, TN: University of Knoxville Press.
Clauss, James J. and Sarah Iles Johnston, eds. 1997. Medea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Corti, Lillian. 1992. “Medea and Beloved: Self-Definition and Abortive Nurturing in Literary Treatments of the Infanticidal Mother.” In Lilian A. R. Furst and Peter W. Graham, eds., Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 61–77.
Corti, Lillian. 1998. “Countee Cullen’s Medea.” African American Review 32.4: 621–634.
Crouch, Stanley. 1990. “Aunt Medea.” In Notes of a Hanging Judge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 202–209.
Davis, Robert. 2015. “Barbarian Queens: Race, Violence, and Antiquity on the Nineteenth-Century United States Stage.” In Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, and Patrice Rankine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 112–132.
de Paiva dos Santos, José. 2015. “The Darkening of Medea: Geographies of Race, (Dis)Placement, and Identity in Agostinho Olavo’s Além do Rio (Medea).” In Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, and Patrice Rankine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 400–416.
de Weever, Jacqueline. 1991. Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Dorsey, David F. 1969. “Countee Cullen’s Use of Greek Mythology.” College Language Association Journal 13: 68–77.
Dove, Rita. 1995. Mother Love. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1999. The Souls of Black Folk. ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Eveld, Edward M. 2012. “‘Salvage the Bones’ by Jesmyn Ward: Tension in the 12 days before Hurricane Katrina.” Interview with Jesmyn Ward in popmatters 27 March 2012. http://www.popmatters.com/article/156482-salvage-the-bones-by-jesmyn-ward/ accessed 31 January 2016.
Fikes, Robert, Jr. 2002a. “It Was Never Greek to Them: Black Affinity for Ancient Greek and Roman Culture.” Negro Educational Review 53: 3–12.
Fikes, Robert, Jr. 2002b. “African-American Scholars of Greco-Roman Culture.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 35: 120–124.
Goff, Barbara, ed. 2005. Classics & Colonialism. London: Duckworth.
Goff, Barbara, and Michael Simpson. 2007. Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone and Dramas of the African Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldhill, Simon. 2002. Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Graf, F. 1997. “Medea, the Enchantress from Afar: Remarks on a Well-Known Myth.” In Clauss and Johnston, eds., pp. 21–43.
Green, Peter. 1997. The Argonautika by Apollonius Rhodios. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Greenwood, Emily. 2010. Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haley, Shelley P. 1993. “Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Reclaiming, Re-empowering.” In Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin, eds., Feminist Theory and the Classics. New York: Routledge, pp. 23–43.
Haley, Shelley P. 1995. “Self-Definition, Community and Resistance: Euripides’ Medea and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Thamyris 2.2: 177–206.
Hallett, Judith P. 1996-1997. “Edith Hamilton.” Classical World 90.2&3: 107–147.
Hallett, Judith P. 2008. “The Anglicizing Way: Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) and the Twentieth Century Transformation of Classics in the USA”. In J. P. Hallett and C. Stray, eds., British Classics Outside England: The Academy and Beyond. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, pp. 149–165.
Hallett, Judith P. 2013. “Investigating American Women’s Engagements with Graeco-Roman Antiquity, and Expanding the Circle of Classicists.” In L. Hardwick and S. Harrison, eds., Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn?. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 131–140.
Hallett, Judith P. and Thomas Van Nortwick. 1996. Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship. London and New York: Routledge.
Hamilton, Edith. 2011 (1942). Mythology. New York and Boston: Grand Central Publishing.
Hardwick, Lorna. 2003. Reception Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hardwick, Lorna and Carol Gillespie, eds. 2007. Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hardwick, Lorna and Christopher Stray, eds. 2008. A Companion to Classical Receptions. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hartnell, Anna. 2016. “When Cars Become Churches: Jesmyn Ward’s Disenchanted America. An Interview.” Journal of American Studies 50.1: 205–218.
Hayes, Elizabeth T. 1994. “‘Like Seeing You Buried’: Images of Persephone in The Bluest Eye, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple.” In Images of Persephone: Feminist Readings in Western Literature. Gainseville, FL: University Press of Florida, pp. 170–194.
Heyman, Richard. 1995. “Universalization and its Discontents: Morrison’s Song of Solomon–A (W)hol(e)y Black Text.” African American Review 29: 381–392.
Hoover, Elizabeth. 2011. “Jesmyn Ward on ‘Salvage the Bones.’” Interview with Jesmyn Ward. 30 August 2011. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/08/30/jesmyn-ward-on-salvage-the-bones/ accessed 31 January 2016.
Hunter, R. L. 1989. Apollonius of Rhodes. Argonautica Book III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hurst, Isobel. 2012. “‘Love and blackmail’: Demeter and Persephone.” Classical Receptions Journal 4.2: 176–89.
Ickstadt, Heinz. 1997. Crossing Borders: Inner- and Intercultural Exchanges in a Multicultural Society. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Johnston, Bret Anthony. 2012. “Salvage the Bones.” Interview with Jesmyn Ward. n.d. http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2011_f_ward_interv.html#. Vq5zhDZUOSc accessed 31 January 2016.
Kimball, A. S. 1997. “Genesis, Oedipus, and Infanticidal Abjection in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Literature and Psychology 43.3: 41–65.
Knox, Bernard. 1950. “The Serpent and the Flame: The Imagery of the Second Book of the Aeneid.” American Journal of Philology 71.4: 379–400.
Locke, Mamie E. 2013. “Of Fury and Furies: Female Roles in Salvage the Bones.” Notes on American Literature 22: 12–19.
Macintosh, Fiona. 2000. “Medea transposed: burlesque and gender on the mid-Victorian stage.” In Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin, eds., Medea in Performance: 1500-2000. Oxford: Legenda, pp. 75–99.
Malamud, Margaret. 2011. “The Auctoritas of Antiquity: Debating Slavery through Classical Exempla in the Antebellum USA.” In Edith Hall et al., eds., Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 279–318.
Mastronarde, Donald J. 2002. Euripides. Medea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McDonald, William P. 1975. “The Blackness of Medea.” College Language Association Journal 19: 20–37.
McGill, Scott. 2005. Virgil Recomposed. The Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miner, Madonne. 1985. “Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye.” In Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, eds., Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 176–191.
Morrison, Toni. 2004 (1987). Beloved. New York: Vintage.
Moynihan, Sinead. 2015. “From disposability to recycling: William Faulkner and the new politics of rewriting in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones.” Studies in the Novel 47.4: 550–567.
Murphy, Dwyer. 2014. “Beating the Drum.” Interview with Jesmyn Ward in Guernica. 17 March 2014. https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/beating-the-drum/ accessed 31 January 2016.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1997. “Serpents in the Soul: A Reading of Seneca’s Medea.” In Clauss and Johnston, eds., pp. 219–49.
O’Meally, Robert. 2007. Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. New York: D. C. Moore.
Otten, T. 1998. “Transfiguring the Narrative: Beloved from Melodrama to Tragedy.” In B. Solomon, ed., Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, pp. 125–134.
Page, D. L. 1938. Euripides Medea. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rankine, Patrice D. 2006. Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism and African American Literature. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Ronnick, Michele Valerie. 1997. “After Bernal and Mary Lefkowitz: Research Opportunities in Classica Africana.” Negro History Bulletin 60: 1–12.
Roynon, Tessa. 2013. Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition: Transforming American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schmudde, C. 1993. “‘Knowing When To Stop’: A Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” College Language Association Journal 37.2: 121–135.
Steffen, Therese. 2001. Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tatum, James and William W. Cook. 2010. African American Writers and Classical Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Theodorakopoulos, E. 2012. “Women’s writing and the classical tradition.” Classical Receptions Journal 4.2: 149–162.
Walters, T. L. 2007. African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Ward, Jesmyn. 2011. Salvage the Bones. New York: Bloomsbury USA.
Ward, Jesmyn. 2013. The Men We Reaped. New York: Bloomsbury USA.
Weisenburger, S. 1998. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang.
Wetmore, K. J. 2003. Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African Theater. McFarland.
Wetmore, K. J. 2013. Black Medea. New York: Cambria Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Stevens, B.E. Medea in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones . Int class trad 25, 158–177 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-016-0394-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-016-0394-6