This essay compares 2 novels -
a Greek classic- Euripides's Medea
& Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.
Euripides's Medea
Based on the Greek classic written by Euripides,
Medea tells the story of the revenge of a woman
betrayed by her husband.
Medea, the wife is willing to go as far
as killing her two sons
just to destroy her husband’s plan and to punish him.
Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.
Wide Sargasso Sea is written by Jean Rhys in response to Jane Eyre.
She transforms Rochester’s first wife (Bertha Mason),
the infamous ‘madwoman in the attic’
to the lively yet vulnerable Antoinette Cosway.
Wide Sargasso Sea gives a voice
to the ‘madwoman in the attic’
and tells her side of the story.
It gives a voice not only to her
but also to the black people in West Indies
whom Rochester regards with much loathing
Question:
One of the most striking features of the texts in Block 5
is the way in which they surprise their audience’s expectations.
How do they do this and why?
Medea and Wide Sargasso Sea shocked us, shook us and
shattered our worldviews through powerful myths. Both
authors, Euripides and Jean Rhys are ahead of their times and
they are sharply ingenious in breaking conventions and
undermining our expectations of myths. They explore the
extreme, dark psychological depth of oppressive, isolated
women, betrayed and abandoned by their husbands.
Euripides uses unexpected dramatic climax while
Rhys applies the modernist style to break
conventions and in exposing the hypocrisy and
oppression of the patriarchy society and imperialism;
they created fearful women revealing the deep
psychological potential of insanity lurking beneath
their consciousness. Both writers explore the
darkest psychological reaches of the female psyche.
Rhys shows the haunting isolation of the vulnerable
Antonette, (driven mad and locked up by her Victorian,
xenophobic husband), left alone, helpless and trapped like ships
stuck in Sargasso Sea by the British. She is caught in the tension
and enmity between the Creoles and the English, although she is a
white Creole not ‘mixed’ she was not accepted by the cold, frosted
whites and could neither fit in with the warm, sensuous blacks.
Shuttled between these two societies, Rhys emphasizes the
ambiguity and elusiveness of Antonette in no man’s land. ‘It was
as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass’(Blk 5, p.183). The
looking glass shows that they are identical yet opposites.
Rhys portrays the living as a zombie, a walking spiritless soul,
‘her face blank, no expression at all’(WSS p.107), ‘the doll’s
smile came back-nailed to her face’(WSS p.111) Readers may be
taken aback by Rhys’s choice of giving the mad woman in the attic
a voice. She gives a voice to the madness and demands that
madness is not something to be removed and be forgotten rather
that madness reveals to us a reality.
In Euripides’s Medea, Medea is a calculating woman, being
slighted in her marriage, she seeks revenge as a traditional
heroic male value. She was composed and collected without
remorse after the news of the princess and the king’s death,
killed by her poison and black magic. Furthermore, her carefully
planned killing of her children which was not done in a spur of
moment of distortion and confusion must have stupefied the male
audiences and send shudders down their spines!
It is disturbing to know that there was a mood of great
urgency in the despairing climax of her speech that she must
act ‘as swiftly as possible’ and ‘without delay’ in killing her
children. She killed them in her home- the haven,a place
associated with peace and security; she shocked the male
audiences who associated violence with the public realm not the
private home! The great satisfaction of seeing the immense
suffering of loss in Jason, her husband, predominates her
maternal instincts of tender love and protection of her children.
“ …to make their father suffer, when I shall suffer twice as
much Myself? (line 1045/6). ‘Are my enemies To laugh at me?
Am I to let them off scot free?’ (line 1047/8). By killing her
children she imposes the rivers of tradition and normality to run
uphill -the supreme expression of her difference from female
normalcy- the murder of her sons.
In addition, Euripides and Rhys astonished their audiences
/readers with their displays of male hypocrisy that reveal
the weakness of the patriarchy society which were considered
perfect. Rhys’s Rochestor preoccupied by anxieties about racial
impurity and incest, has no qualms sleeping with Amelie, a
black slave but rejected his wife when he believed that she may
have a coloured lover before him. His denial of the island’s
sensuousness was expressed in his disapproval:
‘The flowers too red, mountains too high, the hills too near’
(WSS p.42) reveals the hypocrisy of cultural superiority.
And in Medea, Jason, the status-seeker, the arch-rationalist
polarizes himself and Medea; he, the logical person whereas she
the emotional in their psychological exchange. Medea’s theme is
simple ‘Then I saved your life’ (line 478). He minimises his
obligation and claims it is their mutual benefits and that by
marrying the princess he is securing a future for her and their
children. Euripides jolts the men’s ego by exposing the
hypocrisy, rationalism and weakness of men in Jason who was
seen as a great hero.
Finally, they induce a jarring contrast to men’s negative
stereotype of weak women by creating strong, clever and wise
women. ‘Courtesans we have for pleasure and concubines to
satisfy our daily bodily needs, but wives to produce true
born children and to be trustworthy guardians of the household’
(D5b-Demosthenes 59.122 p.103). Women were expected to live
unassertively in private as men’s plaything or his housekeeper.
Male audiences were surprised seeing Medea with her
commanding personality in the public realm of men and
completes assertively and equally with her male opponents;
and her capability to move at will from logic to appeal to
emotion in each case securing her objectives. ‘This one day
- You can hardly in one day accomplish what I am afraid of’
(line 355-6).With Creon, she appeals to his feelings as a
father and finally a disarming humble request - to demand
from him a day’s grace that led to the lethal concession.
In her exchange with Jason she focuses on important Greeks
values of helping friends and punishing the enemies,
resulting in the heroic masculine Medea, seen as embodying
traditional Athenian male values whereas Jason is seen
to be deficient in the male role.
Rhys ‘s strong woman is Christophine. Christophine refuses to
use black magic to help Antonette instead advises ‘A man don’t
treat you good, pick up your skirt and walk out”, ‘…. In the end
he come to find…how you do without him….he see you fat and
happy, he want you back. Men are like that’ (WSS p.69). ‘Don’t
bawl at the man and don’t make crazy faces. Don’t cry either.
…..Speak nice….’ ( WSS p.73). Readers are astonished at the
unconventional image of the sorceress. It filled the male readers
with awe yet intimidated by her assertiveness, wisdom and fearful
of her black magic.
Both writers break conventions. Rhys uses modernistic style of
writing –the lack of connection and explanation between lines;
and she uses polyphonic quality featuring different voices from
different perspectives. By focussing on the streams of
consciousness, she gives the story a fragmented, dreamlike
quality and makes the readers feel disorientated. Her island
setting is seen at times beautiful, eden-like, brightly
coloured but isolated, oppressed and disturbing with a past.
‘I see everything still, fixed forever like
the colours in a stained-glass window. Only the clouds move’
(WSS p.75) Rhys injects a sense of ambiguity:
secrets are whispered, never revealed and it haunts us.
On the other hand, Euripides sets a bold and dramatic
statement at the final scene (the climax) by preparing his
audience for the wrong denouement. A mythical precedent of a
child-murderer - Ino, she at least have the excuse of been
rendered insane by god and she finally killed herself. The myth
has resumed. The powerful effect and dramatic intensity of
Medea’s final supernatural scene broke convention. The scene
of the dragon chariot transformed Medea’s status from a criminal
to the grand-daughter of the sun god, Helios to symbolise her
heroic identity. Medea deprives Jason ultimately of the paternal
role of a consoling funeral and this highlights the striking
absence of Jason’s traditional male function. Medea, godlike is
elevated above the sorrowing Jason. Its starkness makes it
deeply disturbing, how could she killed her own children and
be allowed to triumph?
Euripides uses myths to question the position of women in
contemporary society. He illuminates their oppression and
questions the rationalism and the weakness of the male gender
as well as the hypocrisy of Greek hero. He resisted the superior
attitudes of the Athenian. The reversal of the roles of the
genders serves as a strict warning to the male audiences -
are they still in control?
On the other hand, Jean Rhys challenges Charlotte Bronte’s
Jane Eyre, by giving a voice to the ‘Creole Madness’ myth and a
no name - ‘ghostly’ Rochester- to verbalise submerged attitudes.
She expresses the distance between people because of racism and
imperialism. The zombies are the victims of controlling, cruel
and demeaning colonialism- imposing order in the untamed
Carribean island. Their idea of a restrained paradise is
oppressive. The unspeakable story of possessions, ownerships;
without kindness, without pity, to own each other in marriage,
parenthood and in slavery.
Euripides and Rhys break conventions and surprise us with
their delivery of reality through myths. Myth enshrines
folk-memories, establishes ancestry and offers an early
form of psychology. We are drawn to myths regardless of its
‘truth’ or ‘untruth’. Without myths our world would lose its
magical appeal.
Both writers question the destructive nature of the patriarchal
society. Euripides ‘insanity’ reveals the hideous mind of an
abandoned woman triggered by fury and Rhys’s ‘madness’ is a
mirror compelling us to look into the hypocrisies of patriarchy,
imperialism- the alienation of racism that breeds isolation; our
obsession of processions including our hazy truths in living a
life of illusions. The sane seems insane and the insane madder
and it jolts our consciousness.
(1529 words)
Bibliography:
Euripides, Medea and other plays, penguin classics.
Rhys J., Wide Sargasso Sea, Penguin Classics.
AZS103, An introduction to the Humanities, Resource Book 3,The open university.
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