My New Book, Medea: A Life

 

Today marks the publication of my new book, Medea: A Life. When Heather Gold at Yale University Press first invited me to write a biography of Medea, I was sceptical. Medea is a character of myth. But as I pondered the possibility, I was reminded that no less a serious intellectual than Strabo, a first-century CE geographer who, like Medea, came from the Black Sea, had argued that the story of Greeks like the Argonauts visiting her homeland was entirely plausible and that ‘she is a historical figure’.

So I set to work, consulting every single ancient Greek and Latin source in which she is mentioned, and every artefact in which she is depicted, to extract a consistent narrative line. But I found that I couldn’t write it as academic prose; the material sprang to life in my mind like a story with rich dialogue—who can put Euripides’ tragedy out of their mind?  So my book is a word of docufiction.

I’ve been fascinated by Medea since I was a teenager, and saw the brilliant Mary Margaret McCabe, now a distinguished philosopher, take the role in the Cambridge Greek play. She was under the direction of my later mentor, Pat Easterling (on whom see my last blog). I’ve researched forensic psychology to illuminate why a mother might ever be driven to such a heinous crime as filicide, and found that Euripides’ profile is startlingly close to the typical pattern.

These miserable mothers are frequently well-educated immigrants abandoned by husbands who are local and have found another partner.  They are isolated from adults who care about them and their own natal family. The deed is done very soon after the abandonment, and the perpetrators have often been subjected to racist or sexist abuse. They also—always—have ‘form’—a previous display of temper, violence or psychological disturbance.

I had my own dreadful experience of post-partum depression after I gave birth the second time. It was the sole occasion in my entire life when I was delusional. I was convinced that a group of child-abductors were attempting to kidnap our two infant daughters, and started taking extreme measures to protect them. I tried to roll heavy sofas up against the room in which they were sleeping and put heavy padlocks on windows.

My husband and an excellent GP came to my rescue—neither of whom the most talked about current filicidal mother, Lindsay Clancy, seems to have had available. But it is time that the exceptional psychological turmoil and hormonal extremes of new maternity get some proper understanding.

The signal difference between Medea and Lindsay Clancy is that Euripides’ Medea is neither delusional nor psychotic when she kills her children. She states clearly that she knows what she is about to do is wrong, but her rage has overridden her capacity to deliberate. 

This raises all sorts of ancient philosophical and modern legal issues about freewill, responsibility, lack of premeditation and provocation, which I discuss in an essay appended to the main narrative. There’s also an overview of why Medea, despite her villainy, has continued to inspire women for centuries. Now I’ve got a taste for docufiction, I’m moving on to the youngest generation of the Atridae. Watch this space.