Medea and Twentieth-Century Feminism, with Chiara Sulprizio

Abstract

What makes Medea a perennial figure of feminist fascination? Why was the mythological heroine marked as an icon of defiance in feminist movements throughout the twentieth century? In this week’s episode, we hear from Dr Chiara Sulprizio, a Senior Lecturer in Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. Shivaike Shah and Dr Sulprizio explore how Medea’s story of rage and otherness fed into many of the issues that were paramount to the feminist movements of the twentieth century, and consider how her unspeakable act of violence and her rejection of the roles of traditional wife and mother made themselves manifest in the theatrical productions of Euripides’s Medea from 1900 to 2000 and beyond. In doing so, they pay particular attention to how the different exigencies of successive ‘waves’ of feminism — the need by turns for political agency, liberation and recognition — created different, but linked, responses to this polarising figure.

Bibliography

open-source

Paul Salmond, ‘Guide to the Classics: Euripides’ Medea and her Terrible Revenge Against the Patriarchy’, The Conversation (2018)

Marina Warner, ‘Medea’, London Review of Books (2015)

Marina Warner, Monstrous Mothers: The Reith Lectures (BBC Radio 4, 1994)

paywalled

Emma Griffiths, Medea (London: Routledge, 2005)

Melinda Powers, Diversifying Greek Tragedy on the Contemporary US Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Adrienne Rich, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Violence’, in ibid., Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976)

Stephen Wilmer & John Dillon, Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2005)

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.