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Notes
Shuai was the first to be charged under a new state law passed in 2009 to allow charges for foetal death in the commission of a crime. According to G. Brown, ‘Bei Bei Shuai: Pregnancy, Murder, and Mayhem in Indiana’, The Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice, 17, 2014, pp. 221-56, charging Shuai hinged upon the criminalization of her suicide attempt.
The Call-Leader offered a phonetic rendering of Shuai’s name for their readers, “bay bay shway.” They did not offer similar speaking aides for other non-western names in their newspaper, including for their coverage of clean-up efforts in Japan from the 2011 Osaka Tsunami. See ‘Hearing Continues for Mother Charged in Baby Death’, Call-Leader (Elwood, IN), 13 April 2011, 2 and ‘Japan Determined to Reopen Schools’, Call-Leader (Elwood, IN), 13 April 2011, 1.
J. Block, ‘Jennifer Block on Being Bei Shuai’s Feticide Ordeal’, The Daily Beast, 12 April 2011, https://www.thedailybeast.com/jennifer-block-on-bei-bei-shuais-feticide-ordea.
Shuai’s case was part of a milieu of criminal charges brought against pregnant women in the state of Indiana between 2010 and 2016. Hoosier resident and daughter of South Asian immigrants, Purvi Patel was the first woman to be sent to prison for inducing her own abortion in 2016 under allegations of child neglect and feticide. Several commentators noted the racial disparities in sentencing as Patel was originally sentenced to twenty years for her self-induced abortion in 2013 while white Hoosier, Alicia Keir, was sentenced to a single day in prison after abandoning her newborn to die on a cruise ship. Chowdry and Sangoi argued, ‘The misuse of Indiana’s law to punish pregnant women puts all women at risk, especially women of color.’ See N. Chowdry and L. Sangoi, ‘Asian American Women Treated Unfairly for Ending Pregnancies’, Indianapolis Star, 6 June 2016, A17. See also M. Yeung, ‘How Asian American Women Became the Target of Anti-abortion Activism’, Washington Post. 4 November 2015, accessed at https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/04/how-asian-american-women-became-the-target-of-anti-abortion-activism/?utm_term=.5c38b600fa88 and K. Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Oxford, 2018.
The thinking for engaging with Medea musically originally stemmed from a classroom assignment seeking to equip students to engage with Classical figures in richer and more empathetic ways. For more on this, see C. Bungard and V. Deno, ‘“She Isn’t Quiet Yet”: Music, Medea, and the Modern Classroom’, Classical Journal Forum, forthcoming.
Seneca, Medea, 362.
In the American framework her name is often invoked as if no explanation is needed. Looking at the case of Margaret Garner, a woman escaping slavery in the antebellum South who kills her children to prevent them from returning to a life of slavery, S. Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South, New York, 2009, labels Garner, ‘The Modern Medea’. R. Hyman, ‘Medea of Suburbia: Andrea Yates, Maternal Infanticide, and the Insanity Defense’, Women's Studies Quarterly, 32, 2004, pp. 192-210, invokes Medea in the title but never explicitly engages with Medea the persona or the playworld.
L. Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth, London, 2015.
E. Hall, ‘Medea and British Legislation before the First World War’, Greece & Rome, 46, 1999, pp. 42-77.
A. Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision’, College English, 34, 1972, pp. 18-30.
K. Komar, Reclaiming Klytemnestra: Revenge or Reconciliation, Urbana, 2003, observes the double-standard of violence as hero making in her analysis of the treatment of Clytemnestra and Helen by the classical tradition. Where violence is a constituent element of the hero’s journey, for would-be heroines it marks them as abhorrent and denies them sympathy. Indeed, she argues that another possible framing of these famous sisters could be as ‘trauma survivors’. Additionally, some scholars have argued that the shock over filicide is culturally specific. See E. Hall, ‘Medea and the Mind of the Murderer’ in Unbinding Medea: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Classical Myth from Antiquity to the 21st Century, eds. H. Bartel and A. Simon, London, 2010, pp 16-24 and Komar, Reclaiming, p. 3.
See J. Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, New York, 2000, especially 57-82.
Following M. Silver, Slave-Wives, Single Women and Bastards in the Ancient Greek World: Law and Economics Perspectives, Philadelphia, 2018, this article recognizes Medea and Jason’s marriage as valid.
Between 1500 and 2000, D. Gowen, ‘Medeas on the Archive Database’ in Medea in Performance 1500-2000’, eds. E. Hall, F. Macintosh, and O. Taplin, Legenda, 2000, pp. 249-74, notes over 500 productions of plays, opera or choreography based on Medea.
S. Johnston, ‘Corinthian Medea and the Cult of Hera Akraia’ in Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, eds. J. Clauss and S. Johnston, Princeton, 1997, pp. 44-70, provides a helpful overview of the various traditions surrounding Medea’s story in antiquity.
R. Wyles, ‘Staging Medea’ in Looking at Medea: Essays and a Translation of Euripides’ Tragedy, ed. D. Stuttard, London, 2014, pp.47-63, highlights various ways that the staging of Medea subverts audience expectations of a tragedy and the character of Medea (e.g., the interrupted parodos of the Chorus, potentially dressing Medea as barbarian).
The tradition of given a father giving dowry (προίξ), which modern scholars tend to privilege as the norm in ancient marriages, is the marker of marriages in which the father ‘loans’ his daughter to the husband. The dowry acts as a kind of insurance on the part of the father, as Silver (Slave-Wives), 21-22 discusses, that he can exercise his ownership privileges as κύριος.
All translations are the authors’ own.
Euripides. Medea. 497-499.
φεῦ δεξιὰ χείρ, ἧς σὺ πόλλ᾽ ἐλαμβάνου
καὶ τῶνδε γονάτων, ὡς μάτην κεχρῴσμεθα
κακοῦ πρὸς ἀνδρός, ἐλπίδων δ᾽ ἡμάρτομεν.
See Silver (Slave-Wives), 43ff. for a discussion of the handshake in the sharing of mutual oaths between husbands and wives in Greek literature.
See J. Fletcher, Performing Oaths in Classical Greek Drama, Cambridge, 2011, especially 182-188, on the power of oaths in compelling action or inaction. Fletcher notes the prevalence of oaths secured by disempowered women from empowered males. As such, a certain wariness arises for those invested in male hegemony as oaths frequently undermine the impunity exercise of male power.
L. Swift, ‘Medea’ in Companion to Euripides, ed. L. McClure, Chichester, 2016, pp.80-91.
B. van Zyl Smit, ‘Medea the Feminist’, Acta Classica, 45, 2002, pp. 101-22.
Euripides. Medea. 441-45
σοὶ δ΄ οὔτε πατρὸς δόμοι͵
δύστανε͵ μεθορμίσα-
σθαι μόχθων πάρα͵ τῶν τε λέκτρων
ἄλλα βασίλεια κρείσ-
σων δόμοισιν ἐπέστα.
Though clearly motivated more by politics than other concerns, the famous [Demosthenes] 59 against Neaira provides a useful illustration of how important keeping marriage between citizens was for the Athenians.
Creon is explicit that his desire to have Medea exiled from Corinth stems precisely from his fear that Medea will harm his daughter (283 ff.). Jason, in his very first words (446 ff.), expresses his frustration with how Medea who has made herself a threat to the king’s world. He asserts that he has sought to mitigate the situation with the king, so Medea could stay in Corinth, effectively making, in his eyes, Medea responsible for her own plight.
Here, we follow Swift’s (‘Medea’) suggestion that ‘we should interpret Medea as a self‐willed individual, and not as a personification of an oath‐demon,’ (90) in contrast to scholars such as D. Kovacs (‘Zeus in Euripides’ Medea’, American Journal of Philology, 114, 1993, pp. 45-70), A. Burnett, Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy, Berkeley, 1998, 196-206, J. Mastronarde, ed., Euripides: Medea. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Cambridge, 2002, 32-33 and Fletcher (Oaths), 184, who take Medea’s flight in the dragon chariot and the lack of the spectre of Medea suffering retribution for the killing of the children as a tacit sign of divine approval of the murders as punishment for the violation of the oaths that Jason swore in marriage.
See Silver (Slave-Wives), 85 n.9 and M. Williamson, ‘A Woman’s Place in Euripides’ Medea’ in Euripides, Women, and Sexuality, ed. A. Powell, London, 1990, pp. 16-31 (19).
C. Benton, ‘Bringing the Other to Center Stage: Seneca's Medea and the Anxieties of Imperialism’, Arethusa, 36, 2003, pp. 271-84.
G. Guastella, ‘Virgo, Coniunx, Mater: The Wrath of Seneca’s Medea’, Classical Antiquity, 20, 2001, pp. 197-220.
Seneca. Medea. 32-6
da, da per auras curribus patriis uehi,
committe habenas, genitor, et flagrantibus
ignifera loris tribue moderari iuga:
gemino Corinthos litori opponens moras
cremata flammis maria committat duo.
Seneca, Medea. 102-106
ereptus thalamis Phasidis horridi,
effirenae solitus pectora coniugis
invita trepidus prendere dextera
felix Aeoliam corripe virginem
nunc primum soceris sponse volentibus.
L. Abrahamsen, ‘Roman Marriage Law and the Conflict of Seneca’s Medea’, Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, 62, 1999, pp. 107-21.
Seneca, Medea. 143-146
culpa est Creontis tota, qui sceptro impotens
coniugia solvit quique genetricem abstrahit
gnatis et arto pignore astrictam fidem
dirimit.
Seneca. Medea. 408-14.
quae Scylla, quae Charybdis Ausonium mare
Siculumque sorbens quaeve anhelantem premens
Titana tantis Aetna fervebit minis?
non rapidus amnis, non procellosum mare
Pontusve coro saevus aut vis ignium
adiuta flatu possit inhibere impetum
irasque nostras: sternam et evertam omnia.
O. Kekis, ‘Medea Adapted: The Subaltern Barbarian Speaks’, MA thesis, The University of Birmingham, 2009.
M. Carr, ‘By the Bog of Cats’ in Plays One, London, 1999.
See Gmelch and Gmelch, The Irish Travellers: The Unsettled Life, Bloomington, 2014.
G. Butler, Demea, Johannesburg, 1990.
In the author’s note preceding the play, Butler says, “It seemed that large numbers of English speakers (Jason=Jonas) were abandoning the cause of the coloured and black people (Medea=Demea) to vote for the racist Afrikaner nationalists (Creon=Kroon).”
These categories reflect the racial taxonomy of Apartheid Era South African politics and culture.
Other playwrights have grappled with Medea the ‘Other’, including Enoch’s Black Medea (Redfern, kindle edition), set in the Australian outback, where Medea is an aboriginal woman married to a black Australian, and Magnuson’s African Medea (in Black Medea: Adaptations for Modern Plays, ed. K.J. Wetmore, Jr., Amherst, 1968, pp. 75-126), where Medea is an African princess in colonial, 19th-century Portugal and Jason a Portuguese colonizer and slave trader, their marriage a revolutionary attempt to subvert colonial rule and slavery. More recently, Alfaro, has recontextualized Medea into the modern, multicultural space of Los Angeles and the Southwest borderlands via his play, Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles (accessed at http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/productions/production/13817, 9 February 2018). Casting Medea as a ‘mojada,’ or ‘wetback’ a slur for undocumented Mexican immigrant women, she serves to showcase the porousness of borders and the difficulties of assimilation. Where classical stagings of the play have Medea separated from her culture, Alfaro’s work stages Mojado in Boyle Heights, amidst one of the largest Chican@ communities in the nation. Yet, Medea remains betwixt and between and ultimately on the outside.
D. McLean, ‘Empty Chairs’ on American Pie, United Artists Records, 1971.
Jason’s heroic status is actually more unstable. Medea has carefully worked to assimilate herself into the city’s normative convention as an immigrant woman. She takes pride in her assimilation and chastises others for failing to follow suit. She avers that ‘it’s extremely necessary for a foreigner to conform to the city. Nor do I have anything to say about any native who is stubborn and irritating to his fellow city-dwellers because of his ignorance.’ (222-224: χρὴ δὲ ξένον μὲν κάρτα προσχωρεῖν πόλει: / οὐδ᾽ ἀστὸν ᾔνεσ᾽ ὅστις αὐθάδης γεγὼς / πικρὸς πολίταις ἐστὶν ἀμαθίας ὕπο) .
Fugees, ‘Killing Me Softly’ on The Score, Columbia Records, 1996.
The covers of The Score and the single ‘Killing Me Softly’ feature the faces of the three artists in the Fugees with Hill prominently in the centre.
J. Harris, ‘The Radical Power of “Killing Me Softly”’, The Atlantic, June 1, 2016, n. pag., https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/the-radical-meaning-of-killing-me-softly/484811/.
Unlike the piano and guitar accompaniment of Lieberman’s (on Lori Liberman, Capital Records, 1972) and Roberta Flack’s (on Killing Me Softly, Atlantic Records, 1973) versions, the Fugees’s version backs Hills voice only with a drum beat.
Adele’s 21 (Columbia Records, 2011) also offers a forceful and compelling encounter with female survival in the aftermath of male betrayal. Yet for all of its insight and emotional power, 21 cannot shed light onto the racial and ethnic alterity that suffuses Medea, the persona and the play. In contrast, Beyoncé’s visual album offers a multi-layered, nuanced engagement with African American culture and a fearless exploration of black love in the aftermath of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. Indeed, one notable and immediate response to the release of Lemonade was the public reflection on black love it occasioned. Crunk Feminist Collective writer rboylorn (‘Lemonade, Sweet Tea, and Dirty Laundry on the Clothesline’ in Crunk Feminist Collective, April 26, 2016, http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2016/04/26/lemonade-sweet-tea-and-dirty-laundry-on-the-clothesline/) observed that ‘Beyoncé is a storyteller telling my story, an artist making art out of destruction.’ The feminist journal Signs has aggregated a collection of materials exploring the black feminist and womanist engagement with and analysis of Beyoncé’s work, ‘Celebrity Feminism: Feminist Beyhive’ http://signsjournal.org/currents-celebrity-feminism/beyonce/.
Shire’s poetry is not faithfully reproduced on the visual album but much like the ancient play Medea it has been interpreted and adapted to fit the vision and use of another. See W. Shire, ‘for women who are difficult to love - (the affirmation)’ on Warsan versus Melancholy, https://warsanshire.bandcamp.com/, 2012 and J. Jones, Medea’s Daughters: Forming and Performing the Woman Who Kills, Columbus, 2003.
Several commentators have noted Beyoncé’s use of African diaspora religious symbols, most notably in ‘Hold Up’ where her dress and presentation invoke the West African goddess of love, Oshun. See K. Roberts and K. Downs, ‘What Beyoncé Teaches Us about the African diaspora in Lemonade’ on PBS NewsHour, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/what-beyonce-teaches-us-about-the-african-diaspora-in-lemonade, 2016.
Euripides. Medea. 228-229
ἐν ᾧ γὰρ ἦν μοι πάντα, γιγνώσκω καλῶς,κάκιστος ἀνδρῶν ἐκβέβηχ᾽ οὑμὸς πόσις.
Recall Euripides Medea 476-487 noted above. In most traditions, Medea has in fact provided Jason with two sons, an ideal situation from the perspective of ancient Athenian patriarchy, an insurance plan of sorts should death befall one.
In a similar vein, Euripides, in Iphigenia at Aulis, has Clytemnestra remind Agamemnon of her efforts to be a wife to him: ‘When I reconciled myself to you, when it comes to you and your household, you’ll admit how blameless a wife I was, keeping my mind in check when it comes to sex, and increasing your estate so you’d be happy coming home and fortunate heading out.’ (1157-61)
οὗ σοι καταλλαχθεῖσα περὶ σὲ καὶ δόμους
συμμαρτυρήσεις ὡς ἄμεμπτος ἦ γυνή,
ἔς τ᾽ Ἀφροδίτην σωφρονοῦσα καὶ τὸ σὸν
μέλαθρον αὔξουσ᾽, ὥστε σ᾽ εἰσιόντα τε
χαίρειν θύραζέ τ᾽ ἐξιόντ᾽ εὐδαιμονεῖν.
Euripides. Medea. 807-10
μηδείς με φαύλην κἀσθενῆ νομιζέτω
μηδ΄ ἡσυχαίαν͵ ἀλλὰ θατέρου τρόπου͵
βαρεῖαν ἐχθροῖς καὶ φίλοισιν εὐμενῆ .
On his summer 2017 album and track of the same title, 4:44 (Roc Nation). Jay-Z concedes and apologizes for his womanizing. In the opening of the song, he samples Hannah Williams and The Affirmations, ‘Late Night & Heartbreak’ (on Late Night & The Heartbreaks, Record Kicks, 2016) which offers a soulful confession of infidelity and the impossibility of faithfulness. The song ‘4:44’ lingers over the emotional crescendo of ‘Late Night & Heartbreak’ where Williams voice nears breaking as she repeats over and again, ‘I’m never gonna treat you, never gonna treat you like I should.’ Looping in and around Jay-Z’s confession and remorse, William’s voice drives the song forward as Jay-Z expresses something akin to shame knowing that one day he will have to explain his infidelity to his children. Yet in ‘Family Feud’ he seemingly abrogates responsibility for his infidelity, rapping ‘Yeah, I'll fuck up a good thing if you let me/Let me alone, Becky’ which references Beyoncé’s concluding line in ‘Sorry’ off of Lemonade, ‘He better call Becky with the good hair.’ ‘Becky’ as the shadow, the other woman haunts the pair lyrically. He effectively displaces responsibility onto ‘Becky’ which functions as a catchall for white ‘side chicks’ who make themselves sexually available. This is, of course, in sharp contrast to Jason who never quite acknowledges the pain his marital abandonment causes Medea. Rather, he asserts the opportunistic benefits of his new match. Even in the midst of the corpses of his children, he can only configure the ramifications of his infidelity in terms of his own loss (1347: ἐμοὶ δὲ τὸν ἐμὸν δαίμον᾽ αἰάζειν πάρα). On responses to Becky, see J. Germain, ‘Bump Your Beef Becky’, Feministing, 2017 accessed at http://feministing.com/2016/04/29/bump-becky-with-the-good-hair/. 20 March 2018 and C. Kelly, ‘What does Becky Mean’, USA Today 27 April 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2016/04/27/what-does-becky-mean-heres-history-behind-beyoncs-lemonade-lyric-sparked-firestorm/83555996/.
See K. Wetmore Jr., ed., Black Medea: Adaptations in Modern Plays. Amherst, 2013, 9 and 17.
A. Mbembé, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15, 2003, pp. 11-40.
Analysing Seneca’s Medea, Benton (‘Bringing the Other’) finds that the woman from Colchis is socially isolated in the Roman iteration with Medea aware of her isolation. She functions as a ‘dangerous’, colonized other within the Roman frame (277).
Euripides. Medea. 1329-31
ἐγὼ δὲ νῦν φρονῶ, τότ᾽ οὐ φρονῶν,
ὅτ᾽ ἐκ δόμων σε βαρβάρου τ᾽ ἀπὸ χθονὸς
Ἕλλην᾽ ἐς οἶκον ἠγόμην.
Euripides. Medea. 1336-8.
νυμφευθεῖσα δὲπαρ᾽ ἀνδρὶ τῷδε καὶ τεκοῦσά μοι τέκνα,εὐνῆς ἕκατι καὶ λέχους σφ᾽ ἀπώλεσας.
This is one of the primary reasons why performance is such a useful and important pedagogical tool too.
See J. Roberts and K. Roberts, ‘Deep Reading, Cost/Benefit, and the Construction of Meaning: Enhancing Reading Comprehension and Deep Learning in Sociology Courses’, Teaching Sociology, 36, 2008, pp. 125-140 and A.M. Pellegrino and D.L. Christopher, Let the Music Play! Harnessing the Power of Music for History and Social Studies Classrooms, Charlotte, 2012.
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Bungard, C., Deno, V. Medea Barbarosa?: Marriage, Betrayal, Alterity and the Woman from Colchis. Int class trad 28, 1–22 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00532-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00532-4