Feminist Reading Of Medea's Patriarchy

"She was magical, lethal, loving, a sorceress, a barbarian, and had a savage truthfulness in her heart". – Brendan Kennelly

Introduction
Eight years ago as I searched for a dissertation advisor, I ran into a wall with the feminist scholars on the faculty of my university. As soon as I explained that I wanted to write about Medea came the assumption: of course, they said, you will be looking at the patriarchy as the issue in her behavior. And when I replied that indeed I was not going to be looking in that direction, but rather at Medea herself and at the meaning intrinsic to her acts and her story, interest in my work evaporated and they declined to serve on my committee. Though long a feminist myself, I had been absent from developments
in academic feminism. It had escaped my attention that there were “right” ways and “wrong” ways to study women, both real and mythological, and clearly considering Medea as anything other than a victim of the patriarchy was the “wrong” way. I persisted, found an advisor who could accept my apparently heretical viewpoint and happily explored the character of Medea and developed a description of a Medea complex. But the resistance to considering that Medea could be anything other than a hapless victim of the patriarchy continued to intrigue me and set me to wondering about the meaning of excluding this dark and troubling aspect of her, and by exten-

1

sion all of us, from our understanding of what it is to be human and more specifically a woman. It is this wondering which is the subject of this paper.

The following telling of the Medea story, a composite derived from many versions of the myth, will serve as a point of departure for this paper. It is not exhaustive but includes the major elements found in the most common variations of the myth:

Medea, daughter of Aeëtes, king of Colchis, and the niece of Circe, falls in love with Jason when he comes to Colchis in his quest for the Golden Fleece. Medea and Jason exchange oaths of fidelity in exchange for which she helps him with the trials devised by her father as a condition for winning the Fleece. Jason 's task completed, he takes Medea back with him to Greece, in accordance with their agreement. Medea’s brother, Apsyrtus, pursues them. Medea murders her brother and cuts him up, throwing him overboard limb by limb to delay the remaining pursuers who have to stop to recover Apsyrtus ' body. At Iolcus, Pelias refuses to relinquish the throne to Jason, even though he now has the Fleece. Medea schemes to cause Pelias ' death. She claims she can rejuvenate old people by cutting them up into pieces and boiling them in a magic potion. Medea convinces the daughters of Pelias to do this with their father. However, Medea withholds the magical herbs, and so Pelias dies. Even so, Jason does not gain the throne and Pelias’ son Acastus drives them out of the city. The couple then flees to Corinth, where they live for ten years.

2

There are many variations of what happened in Corinth. However since Euripides, most agree that Jason divorces Medea to marry Creusa (or Glauke), the daughter of the king of Corinth, Creon. In revenge, Medea sends her two children with a robe and a crown as wedding gifts to Creusa. The magic ointment that Medea had dipped the gifts in burns Creusa and Creon to death. After Medea kills her children as a final act of vengeance towards Jason, she escapes to Athens on a chariot drawn by winged dragons provided by her grandfather, Helius. Medea finds sanctuary in Athens, and she marries Aegeus, the king of Athens. She is banished by him when she nearly succeeds in poisoning his first son Theseus. Medea herself eventually returns to Colchis. Jason is later killed when a piece of his ship, the Argo, falls on top of him.

Medea is a compelling character who has been with us for more than 2500 years. Through plays, films, operas, paintings and novels, we have heard her story told again and again and we remain fascinated by her. Our fascination is not without reason, for Medea brings us face to face with darkness that lurks within anyone and catastrophe that can befall any marriage. We watch and listen to her because she speaks to us of ourselves. Medea’s story has hooks upon which the modern viewer or reader can hang elements of the lives of modern women. The collapse of the marriage following betrayal, the desire to punish the betraying spouse, the rage which follows betrayal are all familiar. One need only look to films like War of the Roses or The First Wives Club to see

3

modern examples of divorces where rage runs rampant. Medea thus lends herself easily to reinterpretation. As an archetypal character, it is possible to see the changes in her story from period to period as reflecting the development in the culture as a whole. In that sense, the character Medea is the same woman transported across time; she is the woman who gives up everything for her husband only to find herself betrayed and abandoned for another, younger, woman. It is human nature to push away that which we fear or do not like in ourselves.. Each of us is our own version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The further away we push those darker aspects of ourselves, the more primitive they become. Medea exists as shadow in any of us, despite our efforts to see ourselves as civilized, kind, tolerant, reasonable. And as shadow, she threatens to break out into our lives if we do not work to become conscious of her. I remember hearing during the trial of Andrea Yates1, the Texas woman who drowned her children, the comments of many women who firmly proclaimed that they could not imagine the possibility, under the wildest of circumstances, of killing their own children, not even if they were psychotic. It is threatening to any mother to think that she could kill her children. Yet we know from literature and mythology that this is one aspect of mothering, though indeed a dark one, captured for us in Kali, in La Llarona2, in the Wicked Stepmother, and in Medea. Our culture prefers to enshrine motherhood and offers us the Virgin Mary as the very model of the perfect mother. All of the

4

darker aspects and feelings of mothering and mothers are split off into the Stepmother, the Witch, the Other. Media constructions of accused child killers, like Andrea Yates, buy into what might be called a Medea mythology where maternal infanticide becomes sensationalized as a type of ‘ultimate crime,’ a crime of mythical and symbolic proportions almost too heinous to imagine. We place as much distance between ourselves and the Dark Mother as we can and when we see her, we persuade ourselves that she is nothing like us. We are drawn to Medea because she shows us ourselves.

Feminism and Medea

As her witness, we sympathize with Medea when she presents herself as victim, when she shows us her pain and suffering over Jason’s betrayal and the loss of her marriage. But she acts out her feelings and in doing so, she creates in us an unease. We feel at once the cheer that she has stuck the knife in Jason so deftly, hurt him so deeply, which arises from our own desires to gain revenge against those who hurt us, and at the same time, repugnance for what she does, as it assails our senses of ourselves as civilized and too nice or sane to do such a thing. It is precisely at this point, where rage and pain and revenge come together, that Medea creates a problem for feminism. Following feminist scholarship in other fields, the early feminist classical scholars successfully identify the importance of considering bias as an influence in scholarship 5

and in refuting the myth of “objective” scholarship. Goldhill identifies two basic themes which underlie much of feminist classical scholarship in general: 1) the belief that male bias of its sources and its scholars color the field and 2) the belief that who you are affects the kind of scholarship or research you do (Goldhill, 1994). In raising the issues of male bias and androcentric scholarship, the feminists do valuable service but are often blind to the impact of their own biases. Like the blind men defining the elephant, they fall prey to believing that what they “see” is the essence of elephantness rather than one element of a complex whole. Second-wave classical feminist scholarship shows discomfort with behavior, such as displayed by Medea, that more broadly is considered immoral or difficult. Feminist thought in the early years of the women’s movement struggled to take into account choices made by characters which were not easily admirable or understandable. Rabinowitz discloses her unease with Medea’s murder of her children which leads her to conclude that the murder of the children is Euripides choice, not Medea’s because it is inconsistent with her feminism to consider that a woman could choose to kill or harm her children. She tells us: Given the realities of child abuse in our own time, however, I find it problematic simply to applaud Medea’s infanticide and escape. The difficulty here is both personal (I am a mother and find the vision of Medea troubling) and moral (do we want to endorse infanticide as a solution?) so a further alternative, having recognized Euripides’ design, we can stress Medea’s repressed divinity and the other culture to which she belongs. In this way, we can use the play to expose the constraints of patriarchy that shape Medea. (Rabinowitz, 1993, p. 154) 6

Third wave feminism brought a change in focus for research. This work starts from the central fact that nothing surviving from antiquity, save one poem and a few fragments by Sappho, was written by women. And rather than using this to critique patriarchy, the subjectivity of the author then becomes worthy of consideration. Gradually, focus has shifted from women per se to the issue of gender as a social construct. Now the focus is not on what women did or did not do, but on how ancient culture in its literature and art dealt with the differences between males and females and what their ideas of maleness or femaleness were (Beard, 1993). The argument becomes more sophisticated but the effort to look at Medea straight on in all of her complexity is still avoided. Though we know Medea mostly through the eyes and through the voices of men, her story has recently been told by women as well. In two versions by feminist writers, Collateral Damage, by Jackie Crossland, and Medea, by Christa Wolf, we see yet another Medea. The Medea we know best is a strong and powerful woman who is also rageful and bent on revenge. In the introduction to her play, Jackie Crossland relates the women of Medea to the civilians killed in crossfire during the Gulf War in Iraq in 1991: For the most part, women, children, and old people were killed, and for the most part, the killing was shrugged off as an unavoidable consequence of the political and economic struggles over which those who died had no control. Similarly, the women and children in this play are buffeted by circumstances over which they have no control. The tragic part of the story stems from this: a mother, Medea, is separated from her

7

children by such circumstances and never gets to see them grow up (Crossland, 1992, p.9). Seen in this light, Medea is not an agent of her own destiny and owns no responsibility for what goes on around her. She becomes a rather passive participant in her life, in stark contrast to the Medea of Euripides and others. Medea tells us “All we dream and all we remember is the meaning of our life, and the dreams and memories come when they wish and not when we call them, and all the days of our lives are spent in filling other people’s wishes.” (Crossland, 1992, p.27) Medea, as Crossland presents her, seems to be drifting through her life, not quite satisfied but convinced that her only option is to go where life with Jason would take her. In this version of her story, there is no confrontation with Jason, no argument about who has done the most for the other, no anger. Jason has a messenger deliver the news that the king, called Crayon, has banished Medea. Both Jason and Medea bob along in their lives like corks in water and with about the same amount of emotion or intensity. Her mother, who is dead, hovers in the background and offers a cold splash of reality to Medea: Mother: There’s not much comfort in the world when it all boils down. Men and women don’t get along most of the time. Men are afraid of women laughing at them and women fear that men will rape or kill them. The rest just follows. What comfort is there in that? (Crossland, 1992, p.70)

8

The children are not killed. Jason does eventually die when the oak timber from the Argo falls on his head. Medea lives on elsewhere, with no indication that she feels any agency in her life. As we hear Medea’s story told through Crossland’s filter of feminism and strong negative judgments about men, she loses her energy and instead of seeming complex, becomes rather simple and not very smart. It is difficult as she tells her story this way to feel much for her or of her. Medea also tells her story in a feminist voice through Christa Wolf. Again, she holds herself blameless in what happens and sees herself as a victim of circumstances she cannot control. She has again found her strength, as this Medea is certainly not vague and drifty as Crossland’s is. Medea flatly denies that she committed any of the crimes commonly attributed to her. Her claim is that she managed to find out that in Corinth, as in her homeland Colchis, blood sacrifices were carried out and that she was punished for not being quiet about it. It was not she who murdered her brother in Colchis, but her father, who feared a rival for his throne. She threw his limbs into the sea, not as a ruse to delay her pursuers but as an act of homage to a brother she loved. Quite unbelievably, Medea is neither upset by Jason’s choice of Glauke to replace her nor jealous of her usurper. The death of Glauke, Jason 's bride, was not because Medea poisoned her but by suicide. And her sons, despite her attempts to safeguard them, were slaughtered by the Corinthian mob, which then spread the rumor that Medea herself had es-

9

caped in a winged chariot. In other words, she sees herself as a whistle-blower maligned by those whom she exposed. But, she appears to see no way in which she herself bears any responsibility for anything that happens to her or those around her. The rise in anger about male bias and sexism that came with feminism seems to almost require that women be viewed as heroic and always led by angels of their better nature. Certainly, we see this in the feminist Medea, who in becoming less dark also loses much complexity. Feminist thought has struggled to take into account choices made by characters which are not easily admirable or understandable. In the press to make Medea less dark, she becomes less altogether. As she reveals herself in both Crossland and Wolf, she seems diminished from the woman of the righteous anger in the Euripidean plays. Medea, having glimpsed her shadow in those tellings of her story seems to have retreated from herself and attempted to eliminate altogether her shadowy aspects. But, no powers exist without a dark side, and when they are denied, murderous feelings can become murderous behaviors, leaving us to wonder how long Medea can contain her darkness as she struggles to hold her position as the hapless victim or Cassandra-like whistleblower. In the traditional versions, we see Medea reveal her grief at the loss of her marriage and position, her rage at Jason’s betrayal, her determination to make him suffer for having so wounded and humiliated her. And now, as feminists tell her tale, we see her backtrack as she tries to escape the consequences of her actions, turning herself from

10

powerful and enraged into the “airhead wife” mindlessly drifting along following the whims of others or as the unheeded voice of one who sees behind the curtain into what underlies her culture. Nowhere do we see her recognizing her own role in what happens to her, any understanding of how her choices are an integral part of what follows. Nor does she see herself as other than a victim of the actions and choices of others. The Medea of the traditional versions of her story is not human; she is a creature of myth, both human and divine, and thus her story is not the story of an historical figure. If her actions are taken as literal and those of a human woman, then we would have to say that she was a serial killer and/or a mad woman. But we do not and should not take the actions of the gods and other characters of Greek myth so literally. Surely, we do not believe that Zeus, in the form of a swan, raped a literal person, Leda. Or that Athena was a literal person born from the brow of her father? Yet we react to the child murders in Medea quite literally while glossing over, more or less, the murder of her brother, Pelias, Glauke and Kreon, as if it is only in the child murders that we should hold her accountable to human standards. If we do keep in mind that she is neither human nor fully divine, but is instead a creature of the borders, at the boundary between what is civilized and what is not, then we also open the way to view what she does symbolically. Seen in this light, that Medea’s are not the acts of a literal person but rather are symbolic, the child murders then become more understandable. In order to exact revenge of the kind she wishes, Medea

11

had to strike at what mattered most to Jason.
Jason wanted a throne. Medea’s best hope for deeply injuring him in a way that would matter to Jason is to cut off his ambition, deprive him yet again of a throne and then also deprive him of heirs. Greek marriage for the man was intended to provide legitimate heirs and a woman to run the household. Medea’s revenge deprives him of everything that matters to him. Remembering she is neither human nor fully divine, but is instead a creature of the borders, at the boundary between what is civilized and what is not, we may see her violent exit from her home as the path necessary to move out from under her father into her own life. Though literal murder is not an acceptable pathway, on the symbolic level, the severing of these ties can be seen as a kind of murder or killing. The woman who leaves her home to marry may remain sister to her brother, but her primary emotional tie moves from family to spouse and thus the old brother-sister bond is altered, and sometimes does not survive at all. Similarly, if the goal is to move away from one’s home and all that it represents, often actions are taken which make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to return, burning bridges as it were. When Medea leaves Colchis, the land of her father and the land she wishes to leave behind for Greece, she does so in a way that prevents her return. Medea acts out symbolically what happens when we leave. The home we leave never exists again, except in
imagination.

12

We do not yet have a Medea story where she experiences her betrayal and the pain and rage and directs it in a way that does not destroy her or her children. Symbolically, children are the fruits of the marriage and on that level, when the marriage dies, it is not out of the question for those children to be destroyed. Medea does this in a literal way, destroying her actual children, at least in the Euripidean versions. Though women today seldom literally murder their children in a rage over betrayal by their husbands, long custody battles and other ways3 of acting out within the divorce process can emotionally wound the children. Children become the battleground for the parents’ rage and disappointment and most often they are the collateral damage in the marital wars. In Harrison’s Sex War Opera (Harrison, 1985), another feminist version of Medea, the chorus vividly paints the a picture of these wars and the role the media plays in them:

Some mother, some deserted wife kills her kids with a kitchen knife, here, today!
When you read the press reviews of what you’re seeing she’ll be news and not a play.
MOM KILLS KIDS reads New York Post and that “mom” ’s MEDEA’s ghost still unfulfilled.
As long as things go on like this without a sex-war armistice kids will be killed.
Not costumes and old myths of Greece; the Argonauts and Golden Fleece –
13

Manhattan!
Infanticide appears to grow and in the female crime bureau files fatten.
And the sex-war’s still being fought, which sex does a myth support? you should be asking.
What male propaganda lurks behind most operatic works that Music’s unmasking?
Beneath all Greek mythology are struggles between HE and SHE that we’re still waging.
In every quiet suburban wife dissatisfied with married life is MEDEA, raging! (Harrison,1985, p. 370-1).

In the present, our Medea stories are either of murderous women or passive or victimized women. The audiences for films like The First Wives Club and other revenge films like Thelma and Louise suggest that the appetite is not yet there for a powerful Medea who does not destroy, who can choose to live well as her revenge. In a recent study in Sweden, forensic psychiatric clinicians and psychology students assessing case information of murder found the material more indicative of legal insanity if the perpetrator was a woman than a man.(Yourstone, 2008), for surely if a woman kills, she must be mad or provoked by a man. Feminist psychologists, from Nancy Chodorow to Jean Baker Miller, have focused attention on women and relatedness. The assumption is that women ground

14

themselves in relationship and it is from this relatedness that women’s power flows, as opposed to that of men based in action against and/or over others. In the process, women are granted a kind of moral superiority and relatedness is idealized. One can see this implication of moral superiority in work from Miller’s Relational School of psychology, goddess spirituality, and ecofeminists. Women are empathic, caring, related and moral. Even among Jungians, relatedness has been attached primarily to women: "...the assumption in Jungian psychology[is] that masculine is identical with Logos, and femininity with Eros. It is assumed that the essence of femininity is personal, related..., passive, masochistic, and that the essence of masculinity is abstract, intellectual, aggressive, sadistic, active, etc." (GuggenbuhlCraig, 1977, p. 48) As Phyllis Grosskurth put it, “The nineteenth-century Angel in the House has become the Savior of the World.”(Grosskurth, 1991, p. 27). It could easily be argued that feminism has redressed the problems of the patriarchal view of women as needing to be contained and kept passive by emphasizing the value of relatedness. Indeed in disavowing the Euripidean Medea and in elevating relatedness to such a high plane, these feminist theorists and writers are inadvertently recreating and reifying the conservative construction of maternity, the very model that led Betty Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique and thereby set off the modern feminist movement. As often happens in a reactive movement what emerges is lopsided and what is overlooked is all of the darker aspects of relatedness, or what we Jungians would call its shadow. Having a large capacity for empathy and relationship for inti-

15

macy is certainly a gift, but it must be remembered that not all gifts are blessings. This power women carry is both generative and destructive, something the Greeks understood, but which makes us uneasy. Relatedness, indeed, has its own shadow aspects, as Wilkinson(1998) suggests: The shadow of intimacy, in a typical heterosexual relationship, results from the mating of a masculine shadow with this feminine shadow. The masculine shadow is the tendency to use intimacy as a convenience, and the intimate partner as an object of use. The coming together of these two shadows can make a close relationship into a destructive, victimizing force.(Wilkinson, 1998, p 10) Consider the feminine shadow -- the Femme Fatale, the Black Widow, clinging to her partner even as she drains the life from him. As the female counterpart of Don Juan, she sometimes adds the twist of killing her conquests as an expression of her ability to dominate, thereby reversing the conventional sexual stereotypes. As with Don Juan, the Femme Fatale represents highly refined skills at manipulating men without investing personal emotion. The Femme Fatale is drawn to money and power. Seducing men with money and power and for the sake of personal control and survival is an aspect of this variant of the feminine shadow, although the Femme Fatale is not looking for a home in the suburbs and the pleasures of family life. In Harrison’s Sex War Opera, as the play opens we see a growing effigy of Medea wielding a knife, as the male chorus quotes from a number of literary, theatrical and operatic versions of the Medea myth that demonize Medea for the murder of her chil16

dren. The quotes are taken from the Medeas of Euripides, Seneca, Corneille and Cherubini, among others, and variously describe Medea as a barbarian, tigress, witch and wretch. The effect is a sense of relentless hostility directed towards Medea as the murderous mother. However, the specter of Medea eventually overwhelms the chanting men; as it grows, the chorus’ reaction shifts from escalating vocal hostility to silent fear. Like the shadow, the more it is fought against, the more its power grows. As Jung says: Good does not become better by being exaggerated, but worse, and a small evil becomes a big one through being disregarded and repressed. The shadow is very much a part of human nature, and it is only at night that no shadows exist. (Jung, 1942, para. 286)

We disregard the dark, powerful and murderous Medea at our peril. Fiebert (2008) reports in his annotated bibliography of 219 scholarly investigations that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. And surely we cannot claim that all of the women in these cases are acting justifiably after provocation or because they are oppressed or victims of the patriarchy. We look in vain to the modern goddess literature for some deeper recognition of this feminine shadow at work, because for the most part, there also is a turning away from darkness to lay blame at the feet of the patriarchy once again: "...the malefic nature of the Dark Goddess, as she is embodied in our psyches as personal demons contained within the feminine shadow, is not by nature inherently evil...The negativity and evil associated with the dark feminine is not her true essence; it has only become distorted in this way through our personal cultural repression." (George, 1992, p. 44) 17

This denial of negativity and evil leaves it nowhere to go but deeper into the unconscious, further empowering the shadow. Ultimately we must come to terms with the fullness of Medea and what she shows us of ourselves -- her rage, her power, her capacity for darkness -- if Medea is to become able to tell her story with strength and assert herself without destruction. Until then we have her only as murderous or passive. Every age produces adaptations of the myths which speak to the problems of their time. To this time, women telling this story are not yet able to embrace Medea’s fierceness or her darkness. They offer us a Medea who is passive and/or a victim who shows the “ain’t it awful” attitude that marked so much of second wave feminism, where blame for women’s plight was and is projected onto men and women are left blameless in their victimization. It remains for Medea to evolve into a strong and powerful woman, able to experience her anger and her pain without acting out destructively. As these are issues that contemporary women wrestle with in their lives, it is no surprise that Medea also continues to struggle. When a woman can be bad rather than mad and that realization is integrated, the myth of Medea will begin to lose resonance for us.

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. (Jung, 1945, para.335)

18

No t e s :

1. Andrea Yates was convicted in 2002 of the murders of her five children the previous year. Her conviction was appealed and was later overturned. In 2006, a jury ruled Yates to be not guilty by reason of insanity. 2. La Llarona is a figure in Hispanic folklore, the ghost of a woman crying for her dead children that she drowned. Her appearances are sometimes held to presage death, and frequently are claimed to occur near bodies of water, particularly streams and rivers. 3. One example of non-lethal yet seriously destructive tactics in custody battles is what is termed “parental alienation syndrome”, a term coined by Richard Gardner. Parental Alienation Syndrome can result from alienation that occurs when a parent criticizes the other parent or stepparent directly to a child or in front of the children. It will most likely occur during divorce, custody hearings, upon remarriage of a parent, or most commonly during primary contact with the children. The effect is to produce a disturbance in the child 's relationship with the other parent.

References:
Austin, S. (2005). Women 's Aggressive Fantasies. New York, NY: Routledge. Beard, M. (1993). “The classic woman: (new ways of studying women 's lives in ancient Greece and Rome)”. History Today, v 43, 29-36. Bly, Robert. (1988). A Little Book on the Human Shadow. New York: Harper. Campbell, A. (1993). Men, Women, and Aggression. New York: Basic Books. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Crossland, J. (1992). Collateral Damage: The Tragedy of Medea. Vancouver, BC: Press Gang Publishers.

19

Dawson, T. (2000). The Orpheus Complex. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2(45), 245-66. de Castillejo, I. (1973). Knowing Woman. New York: G.P. Putnam 's Sons. Douglas, C. (2000). The Woman in the Mirror: Analytical Psychology and the Feminine. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.com, Inc. Fiebert, M. (2008). References Examining Assaults by Women on Their Spouses or Male Partners: An Annotated Bibliography. from http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm, accessed Sept. 24, 2008 George, D. (1992). Mysteries of the Dark Moon. New York: HarperOne. Goldhill, S. “Review: Feminist Theory and the Classics”. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 94.01.15 Grosskurth, P. (1991). “The New Psychology of Women”. New York Review of Books, 38. Guggenbuhl-Craig, A. (1979). Marriage: Dead or Alive. Dallas: Spring Publications. Harrison, T. Medea: A Sex-War Opera. In Dramatic Verse: 1973-1985. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1985. 363-449 Jung, C.G.(1942) "A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity" CW 11 ——— (1945) “The Philosophical Tree”. CW 13 Kennelly, B. (1991). Euripides ' Medea, a New Version. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe Books. Kvistad, I. (2005). “The Feminist Politics of Maternal Malevolence: Tony Harrison’s Medea: A Sex-War Opera”. Interactions: Ege Journal of English and American Studies, 14.1, 113-27. Rabinowitz, N. S. a., & Richlin, A. (1993). Feminist Theory and the Classics. London: Routledge. Rich, A. Of Woman Born. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986.

20

Von Franz, M.(1999) The Cat: A Take of Feminine Redemption. Toronto: Inner City Books. Wilkinson, T. (1998). Medea’s Folly: Women, Relationships, and the Search for Intimacy. Berkley, CA: Pagemill Press Wolf, C. (1998). Medea: A Modern Retelling (J. Cullen, trans). New York Doubleday. Yourstone, J., Lindholm T, Grann, M, Svenson, O. (2008). Evidence of gender bias in legal insanity evaluations: a case vignette study of clinicians, judges and students. Nord J. Psychiatry, 62(4), 273-78.

© 2009 Cheryl L. Fuller, Ph.D. All rights Reserved

21