Woman of the Month: Medea

Medea from Greek Mythology

What is the most heinous crime a human being can commit? I think most would agree it’s filicide; the murder of one’s own children.

The act is perceived as particularly appalling when it’s at the hands of a child’s mother. Mothers are meant to be nurturers and caregivers, not to mention the incubators that grow babies inside of them for an extended period of time before giving birth. Mothers literally give people life, and humanity’s collective hang-ups regarding this supposed biological imperative is like, a whole thing.

With that societal/cultural/historical context in mind, it’s no wonder that Medea cannot escape the notoriety of killing her two sons. Even in adaptations of her story that end well before the crime is committed, the fact that she will eventually take the lives of her own children overshadows everything else in her life. Just as Oedipus is the guy who married his mother, Medea is the woman who killed her sons.

The thing about Greek mythology is that a fair number of the stories seek to embody an idea; a concept; a taboo. The aforementioned Oedipus brought forth the theory of the Oedipal Complex, in which little boys secretly want to get rid of their fathers in order to have their mothers all to themselves, just as Electra is the gender inverse of this; girls who imagine themselves in competition with their mothers for their father’s attention.

Within that psychological framework, the figure of Medea might simply represent a dark subconscious desire in mothers to rid themselves of their children, or at least the potential for it. Perhaps there are shades of post-natal depression to be found here, long before people had a term for it.

But within the story of Medea itself, there’s… well, a story to go with it. The reason given for the filicide is that it’s an act of vengeance against her husband Jason when he decides to put her aside in order to marry a younger woman; a match that will grant him political and social advantages. Unable to accept this, Medea kills their two sons to punish him for his betrayal. The ultimate woman scorned.

I’ve no doubt there’s a well-meaning novel out there in the current deluge of Greek mythology retellings that seeks to justify or at least recontextualize these murders. Perhaps Medea went temporarily mad, like Grace in The Others. Perhaps she was driven to desperation like Anna Karenina on realizing she had no home, status or protection without Jason, and that her children would suffer terribly as a result.

Perhaps she felt she had lost everything and so might as well finish the job, or that having sacrificed so much for her husband (including committing terrible acts for his sake, like desecrating her brother’s body) her pride would not allow her to simply give up and let him abandon her without a fight. Heck, maybe as a witch of Colchis, she had a profoundly different outlook on the nature of death and who has the right to deal it out.

Even Euripides’s play on the subject is not without a degree of sympathy for Medea’s plight, stating: “Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive.”

Personally, I don’t buy any of these explanations. The whole point of the story is that Medea does a heinous thing, an unthinkable thing. It’s no use trying to alleviate or rationalize it, for the very crux of Medea’s story is that a mother killed her children – deliberately and with much consideration. Hate overcame love, as she makes clear in Euripides: “I have done it because I loathed you [Jason] more than I loved them.”

Her hate for Jason was stronger than her love for her children. What must that feel like? But what should she have done instead? Admit defeat, bow out quietly, and lose her children to their father? For almost every single mother in the world, the answer would be an incontrovertible yes, that they should indeed swallow their pride and passively accept defeat for the sake of their children.

But not Medea.

The unsettling thing about her is that her logic is sound, and her motivation understandable. Jason threw away her life, and so she had to repay him in kind. The great love she had for him was poisoned in the wake of his betrayal. She had given up so much for him, and was now on the brink of losing everything – including her sons, one way or the other. “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”

And so she does an evil thing, one that can never be defended, for if she despises Jason’s cruel treatment of her, then how can she justify all the innocent people she destroys to obtain her revenge? There’s an ongoing recent trend in fiction to try and soften female characters instead of letting them be cruel and complex, full of rage and hate; perhaps bourn out of people overidentifying with certain characters and so trying to mitigate their actions as a form of self-defense.

But we should be afraid of the dark places in ourselves and what we’re capable of – characters like Medea are what bring them out into the light so that we might examine them at a safe distance. She’s a wronged woman, and a proactive participant in her story, and a human being with all her faculties – and she’s a villain. She says so herself: “I understand too well the dreadful act I'm going to commit, but my judgement can't check my anger, and that incites the greatest evils human beings do.” The most we can do for Medea is let her own the terrible crime that she commits.

(Clytemnestra on the other hand – she did nothing wrong!)

Reading/Watching Log #112

I did it! For the first time in ages, I actually finished a Reading/Watching Log on time. Well mostly, it technically should have been posted yesterday, but that’s not that bad!

Because I found two documentaries on Greek heroes that I’d been searching for for ages, March turned into a fully-fledged Greek mythology month – especially where Medea was concerned. She appeared in four of the shows I watched these last few weeks, and was a strikingly different character in each of them.

Reading wise, I finished three more of my favourite authors as a belated birthday treat: Garth Nix, Susanna Clarke and Frances Hardinge, reminding myself all over again as to why exactly they’re my favourites. I finished another double-feature of period films starring Holliday Grainger, and the second season of Hustle.

Now, onwards to a chilly April and Arthurian legends...

Angela Barrett: Rocking Horse Land and Other Classic Tales of Dolls and Toys

Oh dear, I see it’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. Never mind, I’m back to take a deeper look at the colours and compositions of some of my favourite Angela Barrett illustrations.

Rocking Horse Land and Other Classic Tales of Dolls and Toys was a book I only vaguely recall checking out of the library as a child, but I’ve recently managed to nab my own copy through Trademe. As the title attests, it’s an anthology of toy-related stories, which include the obvious candidates for any such collection: “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” by Hans Christian Anderson and editor Naomi Lewis’s own retelling of “Vasilissa, Baba Yaga and the Little Doll,” but also contributions from some lesser-known late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century writers for children: E. Nesbit’s “The Town in the Library,” Laurence Housman’s “Rocking Horse Land,” Ruth Ainsworth’s “Rag Bag,” and an excerpt from Mrs Fairstar’s “Memoirs of a London Doll.”

The illustrations are of three kinds: silhouetted frontispieces at the start of each story, very small bordered pictures within the text itself, and full-page spreads, all of which naturally show off Barrett’s talent for tiny detail; a trait perfectly suited for this particular subject matter.

After much consideration, the illustration I want to draw attention to is the cover itself (which is also featured on the inside cover as a two-page spread). It is fascinating in several ways, firstly that it combines several elements from the stories found within the collection: a flying rocking horse from “Rocking Horse Land,” the tin soldiers from “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” and (most obviously) the magical doorway from “The Town in the Library,” in which two children are shrunk down to doll-size in order to explore their Christmas toys from a diminutive perspective.

Image source

The work is also notable for filling up every corner, like a jigsaw puzzle or a Tetris screen, with items from a nursery. Everything you see is either a book, a block or a clasped box, perfectly interlocked, reaching right up to the edges of the book itself. As a result, we cannot see a wider perspective of where these objects actually are; they block out any sign of a window or door or larger room.

The effect is to make us feel as small as the children, for our viewpoint is as limited as theirs. By denying us any indication of the larger “real” world around them, the strangeness of their size is emphasized. Are the books and blocks and box abnormally large, or are the children abnormally small? We don’t know, as the objects, wedged as they are into the small space of the cover’s physical edges, encompass the entirety of the world as we see it.

The decision also serves to better highlight the glimpse of the outside world that we do see; which is not portrayed around the items, but in their center, disconcertedly framed by books. Through that portal are tall trees and an immense night sky filled with stars, but it’s caught within a comparatively tiny space. Again, are we looking at something big, or something small?

The children that approach it face away from us, an old trick that invites the viewer to subconsciously project their own identities onto the concealed features. I also like the detail of them having to climb a few stairs to reach this magical portal; the girl still mid-step, and the boy’s hair ruffled by an unseen night breeze. Those stairs are the only thing in the picture that seem like they might belong to the ordinary world instead of this miniature doll-world, which adds to the mystery and mixed-upness of size and perspective at work here.

I’m also rather fond of the soldier on the far left, looking down at his own feet, deep in thought. What could a tin soldier be so contemplative about? I’ve no idea, but who’s to say he’s not pondering the mysteries of the universe?

Links and Updates

SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED since my last Links and Updates post. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get into it...

Woman of the Month: Milady de Winter

Milady de Winter from The Three Musketeers

I must start this entry with a confession: I have never read Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers in its entirety – though I am aware that his Milady de Winter is a much darker character than how she’s portrayed in more modern takes on the source material. In fact, I was rather shocked to read the Wikipedia page on her character and realize just how softened she’s become across various film and television adaptations – while still remaining an assassin-for-hire for a corrupt cardinal, of course.

In the book, her worst crime is murdering Constance in cold blood, largely out of spite. Although many adaptations like to depict her love affair with Athos as a romantic tragedy (as well as the impetus for her malice after he turns on her when her history is discovered) the book makes it more of an opportunistic match to advance her fortunes. And it can be very disconcerting to learn that she’s ultimately beheaded without trial by our “heroes” in the original text.

It’s no wonder that adaptations go a little easier on Milady, as it’s difficult to justify her treatment in the novel – Athos discovers a convict brand on her shoulder while they’re out riding one day and promptly hangs her from a tree. Dude! No trial? No opportunity to explain herself? No benefit of the doubt? To your own wife?? No wonder she hates you! Unsurprisingly, modern adaptations try to moderate all this with some tweaks to her backstory: the 2023 films show us the convict brand was administered at the hands of her abusive first husband, while the 2014 series has her claim she killed her brother-in-law in self-defense after he assaulted her.

Plenty of other films and shows have also alleviated her fate, whether it’s letting her survive the film (2011) or allowing her to take her own way out (1993). I’ve no complaints – think of all the male villains, from Dracula to Judas to Loki to Hannibal Lector, who have been humanized across the decades. It’s nice that we’re capable of doing the same thing to a villainess.

Though of course, the reason why Milady is spared in so many adaptations is obvious: in any kind of franchise that has its eye on sequels or multiple seasons, why would you do away with a character who is as much fun as Milady de Winter? She’s a master of disguise, an expert manipulator, a cunning thief, a crack-shot… you can’t just have her executed halfway through the story! She has to be kept around to cause more trouble and torture Athos in a rare example of a bad girl/good man pairing.

(Likewise, adaptations can’t resist leaning into the portrayal of a genuine love affair between Athos and Milady, for who could resist the glorious toxicity of two messed-up people who tried to destroy one another, only to discover that the other still lives? It’s a dynamic infused with the potential for all sorts of drama, though like Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, they can never be fully reconciled in front of the audience. If it ever happens, it must occur off-screen, in secret, and out of sight).

Milady de Winter is also one of pop-culture’s quintessential Femme Fatales. The debate over whether a woman using her feminine wiles to get what she wants is to be condemned as anti-feminist or celebrated as sexual empowerment continues to this day, but it can’t be denied that it’s a lot of fun to watch. Milady is a classic example of the archetype, charming and seducing her way across France – though of course, there’s a downside. Whenever power and unbridled sexuality are mingled in a female character, there’s bound to be at least some subtextual commentary on mankind’s fear of both those things existing in a woman.

In that sense, Milady reminds me of so many other wronged women who are also highly sexualized: Lilith, Morgan le Fey, Medea of Colchis, Isabella from the BBC’s Robin Hood – women who end up committing terrible crimes as retribution for how they’ve been treated. Men may be afraid of her, but I’m sure more than a few women are silently egging her on, as the moral of the story shouldn’t be to beware of her, but to not push her into villainy through cruelty and neglect in the first place! 

As befits a mutable figure, who at times can appear vicious and cruel, at others pitiable and ambiguous, Milady has been played by dozens of different actresses across the years: Barbara La Marr, Dorothy Revier, Margot Grahame, Binnie Barnes, Lana Turner, Mylène Demongeot, Faye Dunaway, Rebecca De Mornay, Emmanuelle Béart, Milla Jovovich, Ekaterina Vilkova, Maimie McCoy and Eva Green to name a few.

In the hands of these performers, Milady slinks in and out of the shadows until the next adaptation comes along – to evade execution, to be avenged by her son, to find new outlets for her range of talents, to defy her book fate and survive whatever’s thrown at her. She’s an amorphous figure that’s impossible to pin down – even the original text contains several inconsistencies in her backstory and never even definitively decides on her real name.

Milady’s true self is unknown to all.

Reading/Watching Log #111

You know, I really did try to get this one done on time. Whenever I finished watching or reading something, I immediately wrote down my thoughts on it, and yet I still ended up posting this a week late. My time is so limited at the moment, I don’t think I’m going to be able to go into as much detail with these entries in the future – it’s just too much of a time commitment.

But why didn’t anyone ever tell me that rereading your favourite books puts you in a great mood? For my birthday season I’ve been rediscovering the works of Meredith Ann Pierce, Patricia McKillip, Garth Nix, Philip Reeve and Frances Hardinge and I feel SO GOOD. If you’re in a bad mental place right now (and let’s face it, most of us are), I’d definitely advise you to a. stop watching the news, and b. track down the work of a favourite author.

Due to a couple of GIF-sets passing through my dashboard recently, I ended up watching several films starring or featuring (or cameoing) Holliday Grainger – which meant quite a few period films. Likewise, I finally tracked down those two Musketeers films that both came out in 2023, and finished up the third and final season of the BBC’s Robin Hood with my long-suffering friend. 

It’s been a couple of years since we started that particular project, but I’m going to hold off talking about it in this post since I’m working on a retrospective which will probably be completed within the next decade or so.

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2024

This post comes a little later than usual, as I feel like I’ve been running behind on practically everything for an entire year. Still, I always get there eventually, and so here is my retrospective on the female characters of 2024: not the twelve I selected as Woman of the Month, but the ones I discovered, enjoyed or was impressed with over the course of the entire year, who didn’t get the chance to be spotlighted. 

Looking back, we actually had a pretty good stretch of female characters throughout pop culture in 2024. The problem is, I didn’t watch any of shows or films in which they appeared. Tired of committing to new projects only for them to get cancelled almost immediately, I stared watching (or rewatching) media that I knew wouldn’t disappoint me.

As such, a lot of the women featured below are from stories that aired or were published some time ago. Two inclusions have admittedly more to do with how the characters are presented in their given narratives rather than the characters themselves, as I’ve noticed some interesting changes in how women are being portrayed across fiction recently, brought on by authors becoming more self-aware about certain gender-specific clichés and tropes (though this isn’t always a good thing).

In any case, you get to read my half-formed thoughts on the subject. I’ve tried to keep my stream-of-consciousness blathering under control, but no promises.