Medea’s Postpartum Obsession
This article is part of a five-part series on childbirth in antiquity
One day, after my husband suggested we take our son to the beach for an overnight, after he screamed and cried through the night, after I woke up with bloodshot eyes and shredded nerves, I realized just how nonsensical the psychology of Euripides’ Medea is. Not because she kills her children, but because she fixates so heavily on their murder as a symbolic reversal of their birth. Birth is the easiest hard part of motherhood.
Medea is probably the most famous infanticidal mother in Western literature. As a princess of Colchis, she betrayed her father Aeëtes to help the handsome stranger Jason win the famous Golden Fleece, then murdered her own brother Absyrtus to create a diversion so the Argonauts could escape. She and Jason then had two children. The Greek tragedian Euripides picks up her story after Jason betrays her and marries a young Corinthian princess. In revenge, Medea murders Jason’s new bride, her father (an accident, but not an unwelcome one), and her and Jason’s children, leaving Jason utterly alone in the world.
Scholars have long recognized Medea’s obsession with honor and heroism; with the bonds of family and love (philia); with oaths and revenge and reciprocity. But she is equally obsessed with childbirth and labor pains. In one of her most famous lines in the play, she tells the chorus, “Men claim that we live safely in the home while they fight with the spear. Fools! I would rather bear a shield three times than bear a child once” (248–51).
This sentiment is sometimes seen as a sort of proto-feminist rallying cry, a statement of sisterly solidarity meant to ensure the complicity of the (female) chorus in her revenge plan, sowing the seeds for later, more explicitly feminist Medeas. But, as a mother, I find that analysis difficult to accept. When trying to find common ground with other mothers, I usually turn first to night-time crying and picky eating and tantrums, not the shared experience of childbirth — in part because many mothers did not give birth to their children. I think it is deeply odd and unnerving that Medea associates her children and her labor so closely.
Before I go on to empathize with the most famous infanticidal mother in Western literature, I should offer a disclaimer: I am not going to kill my child. I love him, very much — although one could argue that Medea loved her children, too. Nevertheless, the joys and frustrations of raising him have colored the way I read literary depictions of motherhood — even monstrous perversions of motherhood, like Medea.
But I also wonder: is my experience a valid interpretive framework for understanding Medea? Am I even allowed to use my own birthing and mothering experience as an analytical tool, or should I limit myself to other ancient literary representations of childbirth, ancient medical texts, and demographic and archaeological evidence? What does it mean to understand Medea as a mother?
After that initial, striking declaration to the chorus, Medea is silent on the topic of childbirth for several hundred lines while she schemes and dissimulates. But as her resolution to kill her children morphs from ominous subtext to ineluctable text, she once again begins to talk about her labor as the central experience of motherhood. “I gave birth to them” (etikton autous, 930), she tells Jason. She soliloquizes, “In vain, children, did I raise you; in vain I labored and was torn apart with suffering, the pain I bore giving birth to you was barren” (1029–31). “I will kill them, since I gave them life” (1063, 1241). Just before the murder, she tells herself, “Don’t remember that you love the children, that you gave birth to them” (1246–7).
Medea is so fixated on childbirth that other characters get drawn into her rhetoric. The moment before we hear the children’s first cries of pain, the chorus echoes Medea’s refrain, “In vain you labored over your children, in vain you bore beloved offspring” (1261–2) — even though earlier they gave a much more nuanced view of the difficulty in raising children, acknowledging how difficult it is to raise children well (hopôs threpsousi kalôs, 1101) without knowing whether they will become good or bad people, or even survive childhood (1103–4, 1109–11).
Scholars have focused on interpreting the infanticide itself without recognizing how remarkable and odd Medea’s framing of it is. More than odd: unnatural. It is seen as unnatural for a mother to kill her own children, but to me it is even more unnatural for a mother to be so obsessed with childbirth itself instead of the multitude of other experiences that for me are more striking and memorable — more defining of motherhood — than birth (although ancient Greek physicians did believe that motherhood changed women’s bodies permanently). Birth may be easy or hard, fast or slow, agonizing or orgasmic, but it is above all transient. Taking care of a child itself is painful and exhausting and quotidian.
Consider, for example, the experience of another murderous woman from Greek tragedy, Clytemnestra. Decades after Clytemnestra’s husband, Agamemnon, kills their daughter Iphigenia, Clytemnestra gets her revenge by butchering him while he’s in the bath. Decades after that, she is in turn killed by her son, Orestes. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Clytemnestra explicitly frames her murder of Agamemnon as retribution for Iphigenia and refers to her daughter as “my dearest labor-pain” (philtatên emoi ôdîna, Ag. 1417–8), sounding much as Medea will.
But the most sensitive and fertile metaphorical imagery in the Oresteia is dedicated not to childbirth, but to breastfeeding. In the Libation Bearers, Clytemnestra dreams that she gave birth to a snake, and when she tried to nurse it, it drank milk clotted with her blood (en galakti thrombon haimatos, 533). When her prophetic dream comes true, she begs her son Orestes, “Honor this breast, on which you used to fall asleep while nursing with toothless gums” (Ch. 897–8). And in the famous choral ode in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon where the chorus tells the story of a lion raised tame that later slaughtered its human family, the lion cub is described as “deprived of its mother’s milk, longing for her breast” (agalakton… philomaston, Ag. 717–9).
I have given birth, and I could describe the pain here. I remember that it was excruciating. But I remember it almost as a story, as though I were recalling something that happened to someone else entirely. I don’t think I’m the strange one in this respect — other mothers I’ve spoken to have reported similar experiences. In fact, strategic forgetting of childbirth pain is the only thing that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. If women remembered the pain of childbirth so viscerally, how could so many of us go through the entire experience again at regular two-to-three-year intervals?
Clytemnestra’s experience resonates with me far more powerfully than Medea’s — perhaps because breastfeeding lasts for months and has its own pains and trials that nobody really warned me about beforehand. I also experienced something not unlike Clytemnestra’s serpent dream. When my son was a week old, he spat up a mixture of milk and blood. My husband and I rushed him to the pediatrician’s office, sure that something was seriously wrong; after a battery of tests, the doctor determined that nothing was bleeding in my son’s esophagus or stomach, and the most likely source of the blood was from within my breast. I was told that my nipple was likely bleeding internally. I remember how scared I was, driving to the doctor. My adrenaline has never been higher. And I remember that, on the way back, I was struck by a combination of knee-weakening relief and ravenous hunger. When I arrived home, I consumed most of a rotisserie chicken that had been dropped off by a kind friend. I can recall the physical sensations of that event with a level of detail that escapes my recollection of childbirth — so I find Clytemnestra easier to empathize with than Medea (even though I’m not going to kill my husband, either).
Then again, Clytemnestra’s portrayal of her own motherhood is challenged within the play by another character: the nurse who tended to Orestes as an infant, sometimes called “Cilissa.” Cilissa positions herself as Orestes’ true mother, the one who took care of him as an infant on a daily basis, whereas Clytemnestra was little more than a surrogate (an idea that Apollo will capitalize on in the Eumenides). When Cilissa hears a false report that Orestes is dead, she mourns him:
but my dear Orestes, I spent my soul on him,
and I raised him when his mother passed him to me.
I never complained, even though his screaming
would keep me up half the night, I worked
my fingers to the bone for him, all for nothing!
A baby’s like a little animal, it can’t think for itself,
it needs to be nursed. You have to know its mind.
I mean, when he was that small he couldn’t talk,
so he couldn’t tell me if he was hungry, or thirsty,
or when he wanted to pee, and a baby’s insides are a law
unto themselves, let me tell you! I had to foresee
his every need, and a lot of the time I was wrong,
then I would have to wash his little baby clothes.
(Ch. 749–59, trans. Meineck)
Every single word of this resonates with me powerfully (except that it sounds like Cilissa was using some form of elimination communication, which I never bothered with). When my son was an infant, whenever he cried I often wanted to scream: “Just tell me what you need!” Childbirth lasts a day — maybe several, if you’re unlucky — but diapers last years.
I gave a presentation on this passage when I was a graduate student, and the male students were absolutely convinced that this passage was not an expression of the deep pain of raising a child, but was actually meant to be funny, because Cilissa mentions bodily waste. When I read the passage now as a mother, I see a strikingly accurate reflection of my own experience; when reading the passage as young men, they saw a joke about feces. I hope they don’t grow into the kind of scholars who argue that it is entirely natural that Jason should wish to leave his odd, barbarian wife for a much-younger, docile woman who can bear him legitimate children (Palmer 1957, p. 51–3). Some kinds of readings of the text are clearly just as colored by male perspectives as my own are by motherhood.
The easy answer to why Medea is more obsessed with childbirth than most mothers might be that she wasn’t created by someone who had firsthand experience with childbirth or motherhood. She was created by a male playwright, and could therefore be fundamentally an expression of male anxieties about childbirth and male conceptions of what good and bad motherhood look like.
But that explanation falls short for several reasons. First, as Froma Zeitlin has argued, Euripides is generally very sensitive about issues regarding children and childhood. Second, other aspects of Medea’s emotional makeup, especially her pain and anger at how she is treated by Jason, have resonated powerfully with many other women. The Medea Project even uses her story to help incarcerated women.
Another possible explanation could be that childbirth just wasn’t as traumatic for me and hasn’t left as deep emotional scars as it would on an ancient woman, because it was much more dangerous back then. It is true, of course, that I had access to excellent medical care that Medea could never have imagined — although excellent medical care does not prevent women from experiencing traumatic births, and my own experience of taking care of an infant was physically easy but did have emotional consequences. Furthermore, as Sarah Scullin argued a few days ago, adding surgical procedures to birth has not been an unmixed blessing — and as Tara Mulder’s article will show, ancient childbirth may not have been as dangerous as we usually believe.
Regardless of how dangerous ancient childbirth was in practice, in the world of ancient myth, childbirth complications are rare. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Leto suffers through nine days of contractions before Hera finally allows Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, to help her deliver Apollo and Artemis. And Hera’s contrivances also lead to the death of Semele, a mortal woman pregnant with the god Dionysus — but Semele does not really die in childbirth as much as she gives birth in death (or rather spontaneously combust and leave Zeus to finish gestating the god-fetus in his thigh). Medea’s fixation on childbirth shouldn’t be explained away as the normal side effect of living through a generally perilous experience.
A more potentially fruitful reading of Medea’s fixation, one that most male readers of the text might miss, would be that she had an unusually traumatic childbirth experience — the kind that almost kills you, the kind that leaves you with chronic pain and sexual dysfunction and incontinence or post-traumatic stress disorder. Such experiences are only beginning to be widely acknowledged, and many women still report being dismissed and told that their symptoms will go away in time. Do some Kegels. Get some rest. You’ll feel better. But pain and trauma make the already-difficult work of taking care of children excruciating.
I don’t think any scholar has yet taken seriously the idea that Medea might have experienced severe vaginal tearing in childbirth — perhaps understandably. But it actually makes sense to me. It would explain her obsession throughout the play with Jason and his new bride’s sex life. And Soranus tells us that difficult childbirth comes from a psychological flaw (Gyn. 4.2.59–69) — so if Medea had difficulty, maybe it was because of her own mindset. After all, she is the woman who gives Jason potions that make him literally impenetrable to allow him to access the Golden Fleece. It makes sense that acceptance of her own body’s permeability would not come easily. As Anne Carson writes, “In sum, the female body, the female psyche, the female social life, and the female moral life are penetrable, porous, mutable, and subject to defilement at all times” (p. 159), but Medea seems to consider herself exceptional. Childbirth cuts through that illusion.
I think this interpretation is a powerful one, because it opens up Medea as a character through whom we can talk about the connections between mental illness and childbirth. Medea has already been associated with women who suffer from postpartum psychosis and kill their own children. While that approach may be emotionally powerful, it fails as an analysis of Medea herself. Medea is, quite plainly, not suffering from postpartum psychosis. Too much time has passed since birth, and she was already a child-murderer long before she became pregnant.
But the spectrum of postpartum mental illness extends far beyond postpartum psychosis and its better-known cousin postpartum depression. Few people have heard of postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder, which has its own terrifying symptoms — including intrusive thoughts, which I have suffered from intermittently since my son was born. Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders may affect as many as 10–15% of those who give birth — but most aren’t even screened for postpartum mental illness in their 6-week OB-GYN checkups. Everybody who either has given birth or is close to someone who has should the read the gut-wrenching stories told on the site Postpartum Progress to learn about the minefield of maternal mental health.
Perhaps Medea’s myth could give us a way to talk about the long-term consequences of postpartum PTSD. But first we would need to take these conditions seriously, and take her seriously as a mother — something only a few scholars are interested in doing.
In her book Anxiety Veiled, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz addresses the problem with seeing Medea as a feminist hero who escapes from the oppressive structures of the patriarchy (p. 154):
I find it problematic simply to applaud Medea’s infanticide and escape. The difficulty here is both personal (I am a mother and find the vision of Medea troubling) and moral (do we want to endorse infanticide as a solution?)
I was struck by that first parenthesis, that declaration that she is a mother and it colors her reading of Medea. It is deceptively simple, but also rare. I first had the idea for this essay over a year ago, and I avoided it because I find it so difficult to be both a scholar and mother, let alone both at the same time.
My scholar-self and my mother-self seem to repel each other. It is, I have discovered, almost physically impossible to think deeply about my work when my child is even in my vicinity, let alone under my care. (I have tried, many times, to work while he plays independently. I always end up feeling like an utter failure as a scholar, mother, and human being. It’s awful.)
And as my child’s presence erases the possibility of academic work, when I am acting as a scholar I feel deeply uncomfortable mentioning him or identifying as a mother. In academia, motherhood is an inconvenience at best. It’s treated as a disability by administrations and a sign of not being sufficiently dedicated to one’s work by colleagues — a “career killer.” One professor, a feminist and a friend, told me that female scholars should have children either in graduate school or after they get tenure. She wasn’t being prescriptive; she was merely accepting the way the system worked and giving the best advice she could within those boundaries (although Sarah Kendzior got different advice). And when I did get pregnant in graduate school, I watched as male professors’ eyes dropped to my protruding stomach then immediately back up to my face, as though it would be unseemly to mention my obvious gravidity.
So drawing on my experiences both as a tragedy scholar and a mother, to read Medea is fraught territory. Opening myself to criticism both of my literary interpretations and my representation of motherhood is not easy. Nor is it easy for me to say that certain kinds of readings of texts are only available to, or at least easier for, women and those who have given birth — even though male scholars have had no difficulty insinuating the opposite (that women are less capable of literary analysis than men) for centuries.
But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that reading Medea as a mother is both difficult and rewarding. What part of motherhood isn’t?
Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton and teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Paideia Institute. Her book Not All Dead White Men, a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.
Other articles in this series:
