ABSTRACT
The first time I heard the director of the Medea Project in San Francisco, Rhodessa Jones, describe how she conducted workshops in jails with incarcerated women, forcing them to see the ways in which they had been abused by men, while their own rage had caused them to abandon their children, I was struck by how brilliantly that classical reference highlighted similarities and differences in their stories. The women in the 1990s were held hostage to men and to drugs, trapped in a victim/victimizer’s vicious circle, angry, like the classical Medea, but without any of her skills-her spells and connections to gods and her gift for plotting. It may be enough to remind ourselves briefly that Euripides’s Medea never apologizes and never confesses, nor does she ever express guilt. She hesitates, but then she steels herself to be a hero, sends her children off to murder the woman who is to become her husband’s new wife, and then moves offstage to kill her own children to punish her husband for deserting
her. Euripides might give us cause to think of her as monstrous by the end of his play, and perhaps she is a monster because she feels no remorse. I am not sure. In Greek tragedy, the violence mostly happens offstage, while the stage becomes the place to make sense of it; there are explanations, though usually not repentance. One of the biggest differences between the classical theater and the modern reenactment of the Medea plot, it has come to seem to me, is the striking absence and then necessary presence of confession. It is easy to forget that Euripides’s Medea, in the end, escapes many possible punitive endings, including a definitive social judgment against her. She is not put to death or even imprisoned, but flies off in the sun god’s chariot, off to Athens and the futurein which god only knows what she’ll do next. Modern Medeas are not such good escape artists. We have trapped them, forced them to confess, to feel guilt, to explain themselves, to seek penance, to say they were crazy, to justify themselves in some way, to seek our forgiveness and our understanding. But the confession weirdly contains something of that dialectic noted above: an overwhelming sense that the confession should mean so much and do so much, and an uneasy sense that the confession is never commensurate with the crime.
