ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Marina Carr's 1998 play By the Bog of Cats, which transports Euripides' Medea into the contemporary Irish midlands to dramatize the problems of economized family life, the erosion of the public sphere, and the isolation of individuals under a market ideology. In her play, Carr draws attention to how the neoliberal commodification of the family increases the economic burden of unpaid domestic labor for women as well as the plight of the Irish Travellers, nomads who live uneasily as outsiders in sedentary neoliberal Ireland. The play identifies neoliberalism's market ethos and push for individual economic isolation as culturally destructive violences committed against those least able to resist or to conform to the requirements of the new hegemony. Medea is a challenging play for modern critics. The main loss in the Medea plot is the dissolution of Medea's marriage to Jason, as Jason tries to gain political capital by “trading up” from Medea to the more influential Glauce.
