Kelsa DineResearch Outline

1. Social and cultural upheaval

a. Euripides and Medeai. “…A schism in the culture, especially in the great argument

between physis (nature) and nomos (custom, tradition, and law).” (Arrowsmith 34)

ii. A loss of innocenceiii. The state itself doubted, no longer considered “divinely

established.”iv. Disappearance of the old heroic figurev. New, chaotic social behaviors

vi. Drama infused with new sense of rawness and realityvii. Overwhelming strain of change revealed in characters

viii. Difficult moral textureix. “The very strain that Euripides succeeds in imposing upon his

characters is the mark of their modernity, their involvement in a culture under similar strain. And it is the previously unsuspected range of the human psyche, the discovery of its powers, its vulnerability to circumstance, its incompleteness and its violence, that interest Euripides, not the psychological process itself. The soliloquy in which Medea meditates the murder of her children is much admired; but Euripides’ dramatic interest is in the collapse or derangement of culture—the gap between eros and sophia—which makes that murder both possible and necessary. “ (Arrowsmith 41)

b. Marina Carr and By the Bog of Cats…i. Ireland in upheaval

1. Paramilitary violence and rioting2. 1998 Belfast Agreement/Good Friday Agreement3. Omagh bombing

ii. Greek tragedy “permits a politcal response to irresolvable, extreme situations without being crudely topical” (Foley 3).

iii. “In 2000, six children died at the hands of a suicidal parent” (McDonagh 218).

iv. Grimly truthful reflection of rising tensions in Irelandv. America in upheaval

1. September 11th, 20012. “dark, dark play in a dark time” (Gardner 2).

vi. Cathartic, like Medea

2. Performance space

a. Traditional Greek stagingi. Only exterior spaces

ii. Exits into and entrances from housesb. Interior space of Xavier’s house treated like exterior space of the bog

3. Women of power

a. Hesteri. Able to see Ghost Fancier

ii. Can hear ghostsiii. Has a “gift of seein’ things as they are, not as they should be, but

exactly as they are” (Carr 274).iv. Wishes to control or hide powerv. Less of a witch, more of a strong woman

vi. Refuses to yield, especially to menb. Medea

i. A sorceressii. The reason Jason survived his adventures

iii. Skilled in medicine and poisoniv. Curses her own cleverness

c. Both womeni. “Express values that oppose the patriarchal order, and their

viewpoints resonate in today’s more sexually liberated, divorce-prone society where women have gained unprecedented power in government and the workforce but continue to strive for equality, respect, and control over their own bodies.” (Wilmer 109)

4. Othernessa. Hester

i. Belongs1. Has lived on bog almost entire life2. Built Carthage up to the man he is now3. Stubborn attachment to the land

ii. Doesn’t belong1. Descended from Travelling people2. Blood considered dirty3. Faces hostility from townspeople4. Pressure to leave5. Non-person status

b. Medea

i. Legal difficulties1. Not considered citizen under Athenian law2. Marriage is invalid3. Children considered illigitimate

a. Legal reality in fifth century Greece dictated that the children of outsiders could not claim citizenship any more than could their foreign parents. Jason has in fact fully destroyed any status his sons could hope to hold; the fact that Creon initially decrees their exile shows how marginal they have in fact become. The interests of the state, in short, have for Jason supplanted the interests of blood. (Raber 309)

ii. Outsiderness1. From beyond anything anyone knows2. Has been “partially and imperfectly Hellenized”

(Arrowsmith 48).5. Other

a. Euripides invented literary convention of mothers killing their own children

b. In at least one other version of the story, Jason perishes along with Creon and the princess

c. Ino/Procne mythi. Medea is not usually regarded as a play in which the mythic

element has any great prominence. And yet, as recent scholarship continues to show, Euripides constantly employs themes and motifs drawn from traditional myths to enrich and illuminate, give shape or to comment ironically upon, the events of his plays…That is to say that in both the Medea and the Ino/Procne myth a husband takes a second wife or mistress, and the first woman retaliates by killing her own children to punish her husband.”

ii. “…Euripides has combined this myth with another one analyzed by A. H. Krappe, involving a jealous demon- or fairy-mistress who attempts to dispose of her mortal rival by means of a treacherous gift. The two myths together, Ino/Procne and demon-mistress, inform the mechanism of the play’s double revenge plot, relating to the child-murders and the princess’ murder respectively.”

iii. “What is unusual is that here [in Medea] not only is the mother herself responsible for her children’s loss, but also perpetual mourning for them is ordained by her own command.”

d. Quotesi. As Frank McGuinness says: “Tragedy is so often the consequence

of a fatal lack of self-knowledge. Marina Carr rewrites that rule. Her characters die from a fatal excess of self-knowledge. Their truth kills them. And they have always known it would.”

ii. “That Medea has been mistreated by her husband and reacts in an aggressive manner is something that makes her attractive to a female audience today. However, the question that haunts the figure of Medea is how a mother can justify killing her own children. If she can be seen to reflect a sympathetic position at the beginning of the play (and it is perhaps worth remembering that her early speech in the play about the plight of women – ‘Thrice would I under shield Stand, rather than bear childbirth-peril once’ – was recited at suffragette meetings from the early twentieth century), what about by the end of the play? Can an audience, even a feminist audience, maintain sympathy for a woman who acts so contrary to the values of modern society and to the notions of motherhood, or is one forced to accept that such plays as Medea and the Oresteia reflected the patriarchal values of Greek society and presented such characters as figures diabolical to men?”

iii. “By showing Medea, murdress and infanticide, as rescued by the Sun himself—traditionally regarded as the epitome of purity, the unstained god who will not look upon pollution—he drives home his meaning with the shock of near sacrilege. As for the chariot of the Sun, it is the visible cosmic force which blazes through Medea’s motives, which her whole pathos expresses: the blinding force of life itself, stripped of any mediating morality or humanizing screen; naked, unimpeded, elemental eros; intense, chaotic, and cruel; the primitive, pre-moral, pre-cultral condition of man and the world.”

Works CitedArrowsmith, William. “A Greek Theater of Ideas.” Arion 2.3 (1963) 32-56.Carr, Marina. “By the Bog of Cats…” Marina Carr: Plays. London: Faber and Faber,

1999. 256-241.Euripides. Medea. Trans. Rex Warner. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.Foley, Helen P. “Modern Performance and Adaptation of Greek Tragedy.”

Transactions of the American Philological Association 129 (1999) 1-12.Freedland, Jonathan. “The bomb hit right where it was placed: at Omagh’s heart.”

Guardian News and Media Unlimited. 22 Oct. 2011<http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,12269,1019591,00.html>.

Gardner, Lyn. “Death becomes her.” Guardian News and Media Unlimited. 17 Oct. 2011 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/nov/29 >.

King, Robert L. “Life in the Theater.” The North American Review 284.2 (1999) 45-48.

McDonald, Marianne. “Rebel Women: Brendan Kennelly’s Version’s of Irish Tragedy.” New Hibernia Review 9.3 (2005) 123-136.

Mills, S. P. “The Sorrows of Medea.” Classical Philology 75.4 (1980) 289-296.“Northern Ireland: a brief history of the Troubles.” Guardian News and Media

Unlimited. 22 Oct. 2011. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/northernireland/page/0,12494,1569841,00.html>.

Northern Ireland Assembly. Northern Ireland Assembly. 28 Oct. 2011. <http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/>.

Raber, Karen L. “Murderous Mothers and the Family/State Analogy in Classical and Renaissance Drama.” Comparative Literature Studies 37.3 (2000) 298-300.

Wilmer, Steve. “Women in Greek Tragedy Today: A Reappraisal.” Theatre Research International 32.2 (2007) 106-107.