Murderous Mothers

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book began as I was searching for a dissertation topic. I found my way to Medea amid representations of reproductive healthcare, including abortion. Although I ultimately wrote about violence in my dissertation, this interest in Medea has never waned. My research for this book, at least seven years in the making, is the result of numerous support systems, some of which I want to acknowledge here.

I am grateful for the financial support that I received throughout my time in graduate school including a Duke Graduate School Summer Research Fellowship, the Robert K. Steel Family Graduate Fellowship at Duke University, and the Duke Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship. The dissertation that started this process was also awarded the Coalition of Women in German’s annual dissertation prize in 2017. Most recently, I received a Provost Faculty Research Award from Kenyon College to support the final editing stages of this monograph. I am honored that this book won the 2020 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition for German Studies in America and thankful for the team that helped me through the publication process, especially Laurel Plapp.

I am extremely grateful to the colleagues and friends who have generously given me feedback on this book: Kata Gellen, Stefani Engelstein, Maria Stehle, Vanessa Plumly, Sara Jackson, Priscilla Layne, Dick Langston, Holly Yanacek, Rebekah Slodounik, Steffen Kaupp, BethAnne Dorn, and Ian McLean.

I especially want to thank Kata, who was there from the very, very beginning and who I can always count on to ask the tough questions. You convinced me not to write my dissertation only about Medea and I am glad that you did, because this book is so much richer since I started somewhere else.

Special thanks also go to Stefani. Being around you helped me to understand the type of scholar and teacher that I want to be. I am grateful ←ix | x→for how you let me bring all of myself into our conversations and how you always get to the heart of the matter.

Introduction

“Auf ihren Leib jetzt schreibe ich mein Schauspiel”

—Müller 78

[“It is on her body that I write my play”]

—Weber 131

In Heiner Müller’s post-dramatic theatrical text Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten (Despoiled Shore Medea Material Landscape with Argonauts) (1982–1983) the mythological figure of Medea casts herself as an author. Although Medea is probably best known for killing her children—as a destroyer of life, of legacy, and of family—it is essential to remember that Medea also creates. She has children, heals disease, and in this case, even makes art. This juxtaposition of positive and negative forces is deeply gendered. Because of their physical and symbolic reproductive functions, women’s bodies often bear the responsibility for nurturing life (as mothers) and for inspiring art (as muses). Furthermore, Müller’s Medea makes it clear that men are not the only perpetrators of violence against women and that establishing solidarity between women is a difficult undertaking. In this moment of authorship, Medea describes in graphic detail how she will burn her ex-husband Jason’s new wife alive. The play that Medea will write is notably an affective one, in the sense that her extreme violence has intertwined physical and emotional consequences. In Murderous Mothers I seek to articulate and better understand the connections between women as bodies and women as subjects within the Medea story as it was employed in response to contemporaneous feminist theory and politics. I analyze Germanophone adaptations of Medea from the late twentieth century to ask what kind of plays women create when they write Medea stories, and on whose bodies such texts might be figuratively transcribed.

The Medea stories I discuss in this book offer an alternative vision of agency and power, one that aligns more with classicist Mary Beard’s vision ←1 | 2→when she describes how feminist power “means thinking collaboratively about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb […], not as a possession” (87). Instead of power existing as something that one has, I argue that Medea’s feminist power is something that she becomes through the process of repeated, polyvocal storytelling. In her analysis of Christa Wolf’s Medea story, Helen Bridge describes how “myth is no longer just a political tool, employed deliberately to influence the way others think; it is now also a layer of unconscious self-deception. Wolf’s interest has shifted from the effects of myth to the human needs which enable it to exert power” (38). Germans in the postwar and eventually the post-Reunification periods certainly had a collective need for myth, for stories that defined or redefined their identities. In this book, I trace one specific piece of this much larger process by analyzing the role that Medea stories played in defining German women and their relationship to feminism.