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Medea the Refugee

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2020

Demetra Kasimis
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Abstract

This essay reads Euripides's Medea, the tragedy of filicide, as a critical investigation into the making of a refugee. Alongside the common claim that the drama depicting a wife murdering her children to punish an unfaithful husband is about gender inequity, I draw out another dimension: that the text's exploration of women's subordination doubles as a rendering of refuge seeking. Euripides introduces Medea as a phugas, the term for a person exiled, on the run, displaced, vulnerable, and in need of refuge. I adopt the phugas as a lens for interpreting the tragedy and generating enduring insights into dynamics of “forced” migration. Taking this political predicament as the organizing question of the text enables us to understand how dislocation from the gender-structured family can produce physical displacement and a need for asylum while casting the political meaning of Medea's kin violence in a new light.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 82 , Issue 3 , Summer 2020 , pp. 393 - 415
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

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Footnotes

For their generous help, I thank the anonymous reviewers, Ruth Abbey, Philip Baker, Sam Chambers, Adom Getachew, Matthew Landauer, Robyn Marasco, John McCormick, Ella Myers, Sarah Nooter, Jennifer Pitts, Michael Rossi, Lisa Wedeen, Linda Zerilli, and especially Angeliki Tzanetou. Thanks also to audiences at the Cornell, UCLA, and U Mass-Amherst political theory workshops.

References

1 Examples include Butler, Judith, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Elshtain, Jean Bethke, “Antigone's Daughters: Reflections on Female Identity and the State,” Democracy 2, no. 2 (1982): 46–59Google Scholar; and Honig, Bonnie, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 References to the Greek are from Euripides, Medea, ed. Mastronarde, Donald J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

3 Angeliki Tzanetou, “Patterns of Exile in Greek Tragedy” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997), 22.

4 On ancient Greek gender relations and kinship theory, see Rabinowitz, Nancy Sorkin, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wohl, Victoria, Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998)Google Scholar. As Angeliki Tzanetou writes, Athenian women's exclusion from the juridical dimensions of citizenship did not preclude their “inclusion in the civic body of Athens,” and this “civic membership” afforded them “access to property and inheritance,” as well as their participation in “the religious sphere” (Tzanetou, , “Citizen-Mothers on the Tragic Stage,” in Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Petersen, Lauren Hackworth and Salzman-Mitchell, Patricia [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012], 100Google Scholar).

5 Campa, Naomi T., “Kurios, Kuria and the Status of Athenian Women,” Classical Journal 114, no. 3 (February–March 2019): 257–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Divorced women typically returned to their natal oikos, which is impossible in Medea's case, as I explore later. Aeschylus's Suppliants also explores the necessary role that marriage or male guardianship plays in providing status specifically to foreign women. See Bakewell, Geoffrey, Asechylus’ “Suppliant Women”: The Tragedy of Immigration (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

6 I use “asylum” for asulos (728; 387), the term for Medea's desired condition in Athens, as does Sfyroeras, Pavlos, “The Ironies of Salvation: The Aigeus Scene in Euripides’ Medea,” Classical Journal 54, no. 2 (Dec. 1994–Jan. 1995): 125–42Google Scholar. Asylum was not yet a distinct legal institution in the fifth century BCE. The term's various meanings, including the “inviolability of every sanctuary” and “the personal inviolability of an individual guaranteed by a foreign city,” are explored in Chaniotis, Angelos, “Conflicting Authorities: Asylia between Secular and Divine Law in the Classical and Hellenistic Poleis,” Kernos 9 (1996): 65–86Google Scholar.

7 For a critique of the supposedly gender-neutral membership and kinship rules of political societies, see Stevens, Jacqueline, Reproducing the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar and Gündoğdu, Ayten, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

8 Naiden, F. S., Ancient Supplication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, considers supplication a quasi-legal practice because it sometimes involved the adjudication of a demand for safety by a political authority.

9 De Genova, Nicholas, Garelli, Glenda, Tazzioli, Martina, “Autonomy of Asylum? The Autonomy of Migration Undoing the Refugee Crisis Script,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 2 (2018): 245Google Scholar.

10 Stevens, Jacqueline, introduction to Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness, ed. Lawrance, Benjamin N. and Stevens, Jacqueline (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 10Google Scholar.

11 On family separation, see Miriam Jordan, “Many Families Split at Border Went Untallied,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2019, and Masha Gessen, “Taking Children from Their Parents Is a Form of State Terror,” New Yorker, May 9, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/taking-children-from-their-parents-is-a-form-of-state-terror. On terrorist “brides,” see Rukmini Callimachi and Alan Yuhas, “U.S. Bars Woman Who Joined Isis,” New York Times, Feb. 20, 2019; Jenna Krajeski, “A Victim of Terrorism Faces Deportation for Helping Terrorists,” New Yorker, June 12, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-victim-of-terrorism-faces-deportation-for-helping-terrorists.

12 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin elaborates an understanding of political theory as a critical enterprise that engages with past texts not to directly apply its insights but to unsettle lines of thought. She refers to Hannah Arendt, for whom doing “political theory . . . meant ‘to think against the tradition while using its own conceptual tools’” (Pitkin, , The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998]. 243Google Scholar). Some examples of political theory undertaken in this mode include Brown, Wendy, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Klausen, Jimmy Casas, Fugitive Rousseau: Slavery, Primitivism, and Political Freedom (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Dietz, Mary G., “Between Polis and Empire: Aristotle's Politics,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 2 (2012): 275–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Euben, J. Peter, Platonic Noise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Honig, Antigone, Interrupted; Kasimis, Demetra, The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Boedeker, in contrast, argues that the nurse's “pathetic descriptions” of Medea as a “homeless woman” are unsettled by “a series of vivid images” that the nurse uses to represent her as a “dangerous beast or natural force.” See Boedeker, , “Becoming Medea: Assimilation in Euripides,” in Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature and Film, ed. Clauss, James J. and Johnston, Sarah Iles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 129Google Scholar.

14 Boedeker, “Becoming Medea,” 127.

15 Medea's flight on the chariot, her semidivine background, and her propensity for magic do not necessarily make her need for asylum disingenuous. Tragic scenarios frequently combine contradictory (mythical and ordinary) elements. I share Mastronarde's view that the chariot evinces the gods’ support of her escape into asylum (Mastronarde, “General Commentary,” in Medea, 32–33). See also Fletcher, Judith, Performing Oaths in Classical Greek Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 186Google Scholar, which reads the end to mean that Medea “associates herself with [her grandfather] Helios’ authority.” For the different position that the ending indicates Medea's divinity, see Konstan, David, “Medea: A Hint of Divinity?,” Classical World 101, no. 1 (2007): 93–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 See Williamson, Margaret, “A Woman's Place in Euripides’ Medea,” in Euripides, Women, and Sexuality, ed. Powell, Anton (London: Routledge, 1990), 16–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled; and Foley, Helene, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 243–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Kennedy, Rebecca Futo notes the scholarly tendency to focus on Medea's betrayal and vengeance in Immigrant Women in Athens (New York: Routledge, 2014), 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Kennedy, Immigrant Women, 49. Perris, Simon, “Is There a Polis in Euripides’ Medea?,” Polis 34 (2017): 318–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, by contrast, argues that the absence of consistent technical terminology from Athenian politics makes an Athenian or “political” interpretation problematic. I disagree and follow Easterling, P. E., “Anachronism in Greek Tragedy,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 105 (1985): 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, whose argument permits both a figurative and historical reading like Kennedy's and a historically sensitive conceptual analysis like mine: tragedy's “anachronisms” combine features of heroic life with Athenian democracy to establish a critical distance between the heroic world and the audience's. The “incongruous mixture of different periods” inspires a nonliteral critical engagement with questions that speak to, but are not limited to, the production's contemporary world.

19 Kennedy, Immigrant Women, 7.

20 Ibid., 49–51.

21 Fletcher, Performing Oaths, 182.

22 Tzanetou, Angeliki, City of Suppliants, Tragedy and the Athenian Empire (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 26Google Scholar.

23 Murnaghan, Sheila, introduction to Medea, trans. and ed. Murnaghan (New York: Norton, 2018), xviiiGoogle Scholar.

24 Unless otherwise noted, translations are from Euripides: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, ed. and trans. Kovacs, David (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

25 Knox, Bernard, “The Medea of Euripides,” in Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 296Google Scholar.

26 Tzanetou argues that “wandering represents a distortion of the norm of marriage” and notes that in several extant tragedies, the denial or suspension of marriage culminates in women's mobility (“Patterns of Exile,” 23). On the aberrance of moving women and the importance of remaining stationary, see also Visser, Margaret, “Medea: Daughter, Sister, Wife and Mother; Natal Family versus Conjugal Family in Greek and Roman Myths about Women,” in Greek Tragedy and Its Legacy: Essays Presented to D. J. Conacher, ed. Cropp, Martin, Fantham, Elaine, and Scully, S. E. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1986), 150Google Scholar; and Vernant, Jean-Pierre, “Hestia-Hermes: The Religious Expression of Space and Movement in Ancient Greece,” Myth and Thought in Ancient Greece, trans. Lloyd, Janet with Fort, Jeff (New York: Zone Books, 2006)Google Scholar.

27 Medea will be asulos (728), which Kovacs translates as “in safety.”

28 Mastronarde, Donald J., The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 I draw here on the discussion of Bruno Bettelheim's views on pregnancy envy in Stevens, Jacqueline, “Pregnancy Envy and the Politics of Compensatory Masculinities,” Politics and Gender 1, no. 2 (2005): 269Google Scholar.

30 Mastronarde, Art of Euripides, 117.

31 Rabinowitz, Anxiety Unveiled, 129.

32 Mastronarde, The Art of Euripides, 137.

33 The characterization belongs to T. V. Buttrey, as quoted in Dunkle, J. Roger, “The Aegeus Episode and the Theme of Euripides’ Medea,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 100 (1960): 98Google Scholar.

34 Rabinowitz, Anxiety Unveiled, 130.

35 Fletcher, Performing Oaths, 184.

36 For an illuminating theoretical analysis of the “contemporary forms of speechlessness confronted by asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented migrants,” see Gündoğdu, Rightlessness, 159.

37 Foley, Female Acts, 259.

38 This account circulates in other versions of the myth, according to which Aphrodite is said to have caused Medea to fall in love with Jason (Pythian 4).

39 Rabinowitz (Anxiety Unveiled, 4) argues that the promise of the bride to the groom by a kurios was a contract between two men that legitimated the marriage and that this contractual relation also governed the next step, the “giving” (ekdosis) of the bride to the groom. See also Vernant, “Hestia-Hermes.”

40 Williamson, “A Woman's Place,” 19.

41 Cohn-Haft, Louis, “Divorce in Classical Athens,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 115 (1995): 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 P. E. Easterling, “The Infanticide in Euripides’ Medea,” in Murnaghan, Medea, 58.

43 By contrast, Rabinowitz (Anxiety Unveiled, 125) argues that Medea “works toward reinforcing the traffic in women.” On ancient Greek marriage as a practice of exchanging women, see Vernant, “Hestia-Hermes”; Williamson, “A Woman's Place”; Rabinowitz, Anxiety Unveiled; and Wohl, Intimate Commerce.

44 I have altered Kovacs's translation of tekna as “children” to“kin.”

45 Mastronarde, Art of Euripides, 137. See also Tzanetou, City of Suppliants, 1.

46 Rose, Jacqueline, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 68, 69Google Scholar.

47 Ibid., 69.

48 Rubin, Gayle, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Reiter, Rayna R. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 169Google Scholar.

49 Rabinowitz (Anxiety Unveiled, 127) notes that Medea is “frightening even when she is sympathetic,” but she does not explore this characterization in the context of her migration and argues that the character's sympathy is established in the first half of the play but undercut (rather than complicated) by the violence she undertakes.

50 The gendered coding of refugees as victims in the contemporary US context is discussed in Nayek, Meghana, Who Is Worthy of Protection? Gender-Based Asylum and US Immigration Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Grewal, Inderpal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), chap. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Gündoğdu, Rightlessness, whose reading of Arendt explores the difficulties that the stateless have in claiming and exercising their right to have rights.

51 Žižek, Slavoj, Refugees, Terror, and Other Troubles with the Neighbors: Against the Double Blackmail (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016), 88Google Scholar.

52 See Fassin, Didier, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010)Google Scholar, introduction.

53 In Gender and Migration: Feminist Interventions (London: Zed Books, 2010)Google Scholar, Ingrid Palmary, Erica Burman, Khatidja Chantler, and Peace Kiguwa contend that the relationship between gender and migration remains underinterrogated. See also Grewal, Transnational America on the gendered and gendering discourses of human rights, specifically how female refugee narratives fail to persuade authorities when they do not fit scripts of victimhood and proper femininity. Gündoğdu (Rightlessness, 11) pursues the broader related question about how the “ordering principles of the current international system, including existing human rights norms, contribute to the precarious condition of various categories of migrants.”

54 See Carastathis, Anna, Kouri-Towe, Natalie, Mahrouse, Gada, Whitley, Leila, “Introduction,” Refuge 34, no. 1 (2018): 3–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Crenshaw, Kimberlee, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roberts, Dorothy, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1997)Google Scholar; and Collins, Patricia Hill, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar variously call for the simultaneous, rather than discrete, analysis of race, gender, and class in the treatment of women's oppression and discrimination. This work, focused on but not limited to the experiences of Black women, is usually called “intersectional theory” for its interest in seeing the “intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” that shape the experiences of “women of color” (Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1243).

55 Vivian Yee, “Marriage Used to Prevent Deportation. Not Anymore,” New York Times, April 20, 2018.

56 Anker, Deborah E., “Legal Change from the Bottom Up: The Development of Gender Asylum Jurisprudence in the United States,” in Gender in Refugee Law: From the Margins to the Centre, ed. Arbel, Erfrat, Dauvergne, Catherine, and Millbank, Jenni (London: Routledge, 2014), 51Google Scholar.