Medea

What's odd about Medea is not that she commits atrocious crimes, but that she is allowed to do so over and over. In the case of other mythical figures, such as Tantalus or Pelops, punishment follows, and the guilt from the crime becomes a curse which succeeding generations must reenact. Medea escapes unpunished. Perhaps this has something to do with her status, which lies uncomfortably somewhere between the divine and the human.

Some scholars have suggested that Medea was a minor goddess assimilated into the Greek pantheon, or perhaps some kind of vengeful daemon associated with childbearing. But it doesn't really explain the diversity of myths about her, or why she is consistently associated with particularly gruesome deeds which transgress the most sacred norms of Greek society: the bonds of family and guest friendship, respect for the gods.

In some ways Medea is the opposite of the Erinyes – instead of the punisher of those who slay their kin, she is the enactor of these abominable deeds, all of which seem to be strangely unmotivated. Even in Euripides, where she is allowed to argue her case, the murder of her children ultimately seems out of proportion to the wrongs done to her: The essential arbitrariness of the destruction, the sense that it happens without any particular evil intention on her part (or is this simply a result of the lack of psychological development in myth, the way it simply states facts and does not inquire too deeply into their causes?).

On tragic form

We've been reading the Bacchae for my Greek class and it suddenly dawned on me how much it has in common with Kleist's play Penthesilea. Not just because of their violence, or in the similarities of the savage customs of the Amazons with the rituals of the maenads, and the challenge both of them pose to conventional views of femininity. It's the sudden, violent intrusion of an outside force which destabilizes the entire system upon which society is based: the cult of Dionysus in the Bacchae, the Amazons in Penthesilea. The inability to integrate this third element sets in motion the tragic development of the action.

It seems to me there's a subtle, but perhaps important difference from more classical models for tragedy, where the tension results from the pull of competing, but equally valid claims (for example, the conflict between duty to one's parents and necessity of avenging a crime in the Oresteia, or between obedience to to the state and respect for the dead in Antigone). Here, instead, one of the claims is not only unrecognized, but even explicitly rejected.