ABSTRACT
The quest for the Golden Fleece by the Argonauts has been a paradigmatic example of the exploration (and exploitation) of new territories in the European imaginary. Thus, in the nineteenth century, at the height of modern colonialism, Jason’s quest was used as the mythical support to justify both European imperialism and museums’ practice of acquiring cultural treasures from “exotic” places to satisfy the European public. However, it was also in the nineteenth century when Medea, like other female characters from Greco-Roman mythology, began to gain prominence in revisions of classical myth. Hence, by the twentieth century, foreignness became more and more her main defining feature and, consequently, the legend turned out to be a privileged way of conveying a critique of colonialism. This is the basis on which Pier Paolo Pasolini builds his reinterpretation of the story in Medea (1969), in which the association between the Argonauts and colonial power emerges at full force. To do so, Pasolini uses a series of contrasting oppositions that play with the collective imaginary and exploit his audience’s horizon of expectations in order to challenge its Western gaze.
