Medea is the ultimate she-devil: a scorned woman so hellish she kills her own children to spite Jason, her adulterous husband.
Strange as it seems, my own mother introduced me to Medea. Passionate about theatre, she took me to watch classical tragedies from childhood. Over the decades, I’ve seen Medea, which was dramatized by ancient Greek writer Euripides, performed by great actors including Diana Rigg, Fiona Shaw, Helen McCrory and Sophie Okonedo.
Medea came to fascinate me. On the one hand she was the worst woman in the world. On the other, she was a colossus: bestriding every production with an incandescent fury that felt exultant, seductive and vital. McCrory is described by one critic as “satisfyingly muscular”. Okonedo as “blazing, skinless, vivid, wrenching”.
Furthermore, as Okonedo’s reviewer also pointed out, Medea possesses the gift of “critical thinking”.
Often women abandoned by men are portrayed as victims: desperate, neurotic, maddened by pain, prone to acts of self-destruction. Think of Glenn Close taking it out on the bunny in Fatal Attraction or Antoinette Cosway setting light to her attic prison while Mr Rochester finds love with meek Jane Eyre.
But Medea’s fury, despite its immoral outcome, feels like a rational response to the enormity of Jason’s betrayal.
This is a woman who has sacrificed everything for love. Although Euripides’ play is set in Corinth, Jason and Medea meet in Colchis, a kingdom on the Black Sea ruled by Medea’s father, King Aetes. When Jason arrived with his crew of Argonauts to steal Aetes’ Golden Fleece, it’s Medea’s magic – she’s said to be a witch – that makes it happen. After falling in love, the pair escape together to Corinth. To distract her father from his pursuit, Medea even kills her own brother.
In Corinth, they settle and have children. But Jason takes a second wife, the daughter of the Corinthian king, Creon. To add insult to injury, he tells Medea he has betrayed her for her own good as this marriage will secure the whole family’s safety in their new land.
Medea is left reeling from what, in modern terms, would be described as gaslighting. To intensify her misery, Creon banishes her because he fears she will use her “dark knowledge” to revenge herself.
As the drama builds to its chilling finale, it’s impossible not to empathise with Medea’s outrage even as she commits her heinous crime. Ultimately, Medea leaves her audience divided, finding her at once irresistibly compelling and irredeemably malign.
Our ambivalence around Medea reflects a more universal dilemma about female rage. Even today, angry women are demonised and punished. Thelma and Louise were captivating, but that didn’t stop them dying at the end. Even as I was awed by the courage and dignity of Gisele Pelicot recently, I couldn’t help wondering if she would have been hailed as a female role model had she responded to the violence wrought upon her with an equally ferocious response of her own?
Yet what woman hasn’t experienced moments of violent rage? My own tipping point came a couple of decades ago. Like Medea, who is derided as a ‘barbarian’ in Corinth because she isn’t a Greek, I was a foreigner living in a culture that was not my own because I’d followed my partner there. This was the man I assumed would father my children and accompany me into old age.
When he left me, I was numb with heartbreak. Then misery gave way to anger; a seething, luminous rage that invaded my mind and body, knotting my bones and sinews, causing me phantom pains and crippling headaches.
Night after night, I pounded the treadmill in the local gym in an effort to exorcise my demons. I screamed insults at my ex, wrote him vile emails, yelled at him on the phone.
Those diatribes were monologues in my own head. In truth, I was frightened of my feelings; of where they would take me if I unleashed them. If I confessed my fury to friends, many withdrew in embarrassment, whereas if I wept, they were all sympathy. Even my own mother, with whom I had a complex though loving relationship, stopped calling me during this time.
Clearly, it wasn’t on for a woman to be so raw, so honest about her anger. I learnt to bury my feelings, put on a smile and tell everyone I was better off without him.
In the end, that became true. Thanks to a good therapist, a handful of amazing friends who sat out my ‘mad years’ and my eventual acquisition of a new language, the time came when I no longer felt like a barren spinster in exile.
Those last years abroad were among my happiest. Now in my late 30s, I made a conscious choice not to have children. My enforced solo state had revealed that solitude suited me. It gave me time: to read, write, dream.
A baby, I knew, would swallow up those precious, unguarded hours. When friends who were writers became mothers I saw how ingeniously they negotiated the demands on their time. Often they succeeded magnificently, turning out poems, articles and novels even with “the pram in the hall”. But I sensed I lacked the extra pyschic gear that would allow me to have it all. When I decided to remain child-free, I liberated myself from a long-held burden of my own and others’ expectations.
The next time I saw a production of Medea her character resonated more strongly than ever. By now reunited with Mum – who never challenged my decision to not have children – we saw a performance at the Rose Theatre in Kingston by the Actors of Dionysus, who used aerial skills to give the play a new perspective. As Tamsin Shasha, who was playing Medea, soared above the stage on scarlet silks, Medea’s fury literally gave her wings.
My rage had felt like failure, weakness, an indelible stain on my identity as a civilised woman. Medea’s emotion was proud, cathartic, transcendent. It made her fly.
By now, I was back in the UK, settled with a new partner with whom I shared a life but not a roof, thereby gaining the solitude I’d come to love.
Yet still Medea haunted me. After seeing Shasha’s performance, I read the play for the first time. One stage direction particularly struck me. In the final scene, Medea appears on stage in a chariot drawn by dragons as if she was a victorious heroine.
Curious as to Medea’s fate after her crime, I discovered that certain myths continue her triumphant aftermath. In one, she is recognised as a goddess and spends her afterlife in the Elysian Fields where she marries Achilles, the hero of the Trojan war. That narrative astounded me. It was as if Prince Charming ended up with the Ugly Sister. Yet these happy endings had been erased from the mainstream archive.
At the same time as I was musing on Medea, I happened upon Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, a slim book by the quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli. At school, I had been a dullard in science classes. But Rovelli wrote like a poet, comparing spacetime to Venetian lace, and invoking Beethoven, Dante and St Augustine in order to express the quantum’s world strange beauty.
Rovelli showed me that beneath the surface of my everyday habitat lurked a hidden region where time and space behaved against Newtonian logic, where everything was interwoven with everything else and nothing was fixed or certain.
Though Rovelli eschewed religion, he was not immune to reaching for the supernatural as metaphor. He described quantum entanglement for example as ‘enchanted and dreamy’. He even quoted Einstein’s description of quantum physics as ‘real witchery.’
Rovelli’s flirtation with the occult metaphor gave me the key to my own poem about Medea, in which I try to express her anger as a form of liberation rather than evil or despair.
What, I said to myself, if she hadn’t been a witch at all? What if she had been a quantum scientist ahead of her time? If she spent her days bending time and space in her laboratory, no wonder she was feared as a sorceress by the likes of Creon.
But how could I justify the murder of her own children? Medea, I reminded myself, was a figure of myth. Had a real Medea existed at all?
Surely it was relevant that her myth-makers were all men. Aside from Euripides, the other key text about her is Jason and The Argonauts. The prequel to Euripides’ play, it was written later, in the 3rd century BC, by Apollonius of Rhodes.
Both Apollonius and Euripides emphasised Medea’s powers of intelligence. Apollonius describes her as “the clever one”; and a “girl [who] can pause stars” – a description which chimed wonderfully with my quantum theory. In Euripides’ play, Creon observes of Medea that a woman who is “hot-tempered… is easier to guard against than one who is clever and controls her tongue” suggesting that Medea is indeed far more rational than her anger makes her appear.
What if the myths around Medea operated as warning tales? Ways to deter intelligent women from embracing their own agency and power. Witches have been demonised throughout history. Wise women, with healing powers, who often lived alone, they represented a threat to society which demanded women be wives and mothers, subservient to men.
Perhaps the real Medea never had children at all. What if she was a childless, migrant scientist? How terrifying would that make her?
Look what happens, whisper the male storytellers, to foreign, clever, independent-minded women, you’ll go down in history as barbarian, murderous, child-killing witches.
If men can write myths around women, women can too. I decided to write a version of Medea in which I put her motherhood in metaphorical brackets. Perhaps, like the witches of yesteryear, like me, my Medea chose childlessness as a route to freedom.
Perhaps her anger, as mine was, was a form of trial by fury that allowed her to transcend loss and discover more nourishing ways of living on the other side.
Medea’s anger, whatever its outcome, was honest and true. In an essay about women and honesty, the US poet Adrienne Rich, a songstress of radical female resistance, talks about “the void” in the psychic belly of every woman.
“The liar fears the void” writes Rich. Instead, she explains that the void “is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy. But in women it has been identified with lovelessness, barrenness, sterility. We have been urged to fill our ‘emptiness’ with children. We are not supposed to go down in to the darkness of the core.
Yet if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of our truth.”
These days, we talk a lot about truth. How frail it is; how challenged and precarious. As our politicians try to convince us to support the genocide in Gaza, as we watch the dismemberment of Roe v Wade, as business leaders continue to profit from our catastrophically overheating world, millions of us know that our own truths are being erased from public policies that shape our world. Whole populations are being gaslit. Little wonder there is a newfound civic fury; a focused, pragmatic and non-violent anger that is fuelling popular resistance – demonstrations, strikes, boycotts – to the systems of power that threaten our collective well-being.
When Medea resists the lies of the men who wish to marginalise and disavow her, she speaks truth to power with a fearlessness that could be a template for our times.
My poem about the worst woman in the world was written out of my own truth, my own void, my own darkness, whose mysterious fecundity I barely understand yet am learning to trust in times when I trust so few of those institutions in which I once had faith.
The poem is one half of a new collection entitled Daughter of the Sun. The other half consists of sonnets written about my mother as she battled – fiercely yet with courage, wit, and love – the cancer that would finally take her from us.
I don’t know what it means that without my own mother, I’d never have discovered Medea nor found my own path to freedom both as a poet and a woman who understood that motherhood was not for her. But I know that Mum would be amused and intrigued that the poems about her are side by side with those about the ultimate unmother.
On Mum’s last night, I watched her soul fly free. It was a moment of catharsis and release. It’s like going through fire I whispered to my partner, as if I’d sensed the breath of dragons as they carried her away.
The Emma Press will publish Daughter of the Sun, the second poetry collection from Rachel Spence, on 13 February 2025.
On March 13 at 7.30pm at the Ludlow Assembly Rooms, in Ludlow, Shropshire, Rachel Spence will perform a live reading from Daughter of the Sun and an in-conversation withpoet Pele Cox (https://pelecox.com)
To book, click here:
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