Medeia: Maiden, Mother, Monster: a Biopoetic Analysis

Abstract

The analysis of literature using evolutionary literary theory now has a scholarly record of two decades. While several archaic and classical Greek works have been interpreted with insightful and productive results using a biopoetic critical method, Classical scholars have not yet to any degree taken up the approach. This thesis aims to establish whether the characterization of Medeia in three Greek texts involving three different literary genres, Pindar’s Fourth Pythian ode, Euripides’ tragedy Medeia, and Apollonios’ epic the Argonautika, follows that predicted by the findings of evolutionary psychology.

Excerpts from the texts are compared against the relevant findings of evolutionary psychology influencing the construction and reception of narrative character and action, and considered in relation to a number of biologically and psychologically informed motivations and behaviours from among those posited by evolutionary psychologists. These include: mating strategies, attractiveness, marriage, sexuality, romantic love, jealousy, parental investment, kin relationships, infanticide, and the factors predetermining filicide - mental illness and status issues.

This analysis finds that all of these ancient writers achieve maximum audience engagement with characters and action through the integration of expected behaviour and thought with unexpected or transgressive characterization. This is successful because authors and audiences share an experience and understanding of evolved human action and psychology, above and beyond cultural experience.

In all the texts, the characterization of Medeia is expanded through depiction of other conventionally gendered or transgressive male-female relationships. Where aspects of Medeia’s motivation and behaviour (and those of her significant others) are in direct contravention of evolutionary prediction, this thesis argues that these inversions were intentional on the part of the authors, who, aware of audience social and literary expectation, manipulated these expectations for literary effect. While Medeia’s unfeminine powers are deliberately highlighted through the depiction of Iason’s ambivalent masculinity, the wider focus of all three works suggests that while elements of Iason and Medeia’s conflict lay in their self-arranged marriage, their dysfunctional relationships with kin, and their self-centred view of their children as instrumental, the heart of their struggle lies in the intrinsic and irreconcilable reproductive strategic conflict between the sexes.