Euripides

Having read Medea for class, I can now say I have read three of Euripides' plays (the other two being Helen and The Bacchae). I think this is really pretty good. I even, this time around, read most of the (quite long) introduction to the book, and all of the introduction to Medea.

Euripides, it turns out, is of particular interest because no one can decide if he was a feminist (or the Greek variant thereof) or the opposite. He featured women as main characters more often than either of the other two 5th century Athenian tragedians (Aristophanes and Sophocles) whose plays remain to us. These were often very powerful women, who in all kinds of ways defy ancient Greek assumptions of what a woman is supposed to be. Medea is this extremely powerful woman, yet she is also terrible woman. We have to ask whether Euripides was saying that only the bad women can have power, or whether the only acceptable way to show that women could be powerful was to make them bad.

Medea is of particular interest in this question. You know the story, right? She helps Jason steal the Golden Fleece and then runs away to Corinth with him, they have two sons, and then he leaves her to marry the daughter of King Kreon. She is (justifiably) angry, and decides (justifiably?) to kill Jason's new wife, Jason's new father-in-law, and both of her sons. Medea is in many ways very masculine, often uses masculine language for things (yes, I even read the forty billion endnotes that told me this), kills her children using a sword, a stereotypically masculine means of death. She is also very feminine, represented as loving her children enormously, and she kills Kreon and his daughter by poison, a stereotypically feminine method. In Greek terms, of course, appearing on stage at all is masculine. Women were supposed to stay inside the house, and the way the Greek theatre was set up there was a house at the back of the stage; to be on stage you had to come out of the house.

Medea is the driving force of the play. By contrast, all the men are rather ineffective. Kreon knows something bad will happen if he doesn't exile Medea immediately, but this doesn't help him. Jason, too, appears a little wishy-washy. So gender in this play is complicated.

I'm sad the experience of real Greek theatre can't be totally recreated. Greek theatre was much more like a baseball game than a modern play, and there's really no way to change the expectations of modern theatregoers enough to achieve that.

So I liked the play a lot, insofar as it raises interesting questions and musings. I'd like to see a production of it, even if it won't be much like Euripides intended.

Impulse and desire

I'm rereading Tam Lin, and I'd totally forgotten how much it makes me want to read the classics. The English sort and the Greek and Roman sort. I usually wind up digging out my Norton Anthology of English Literature. So I sat down with one of Euripides' plays out of one of my textbooks. I picked Helen, because it's not the play I know I'll have to read for class and I particularly like the bits of Greek myth related to the Trojan War.

I have a sort of funny relationship to Greek literature. For some unknown reason of unknown origins, I always really wanted a classical education, the sort of thing taught in British public schools a century ago. I wanted to be taught Greek and Latin, and maybe French and German too, and be made to read all the classics. I really have no idea where I got this particular desire, but it's stuck with me. Going to an (often not very rigorous) alternative school wasn't especially conducive to this kind of education, though I did wind up reading a couple of Greek plays and some (very minimal) Shakespeare. Otherwise most of the books I've read that are usually taught in school I read just because I wanted to. Fortunately the benefit of said alternative school was being encouraged to go in my own directions, and whatever reading I did outside of class being credited towards my graduation (it thus looks from my transcript like I took eight years of English classes in my four years of high school). Still, I don't feel like I've read all the things I should.

Every time I reread Tam Lin all this comes to mind. This book is absolutely full of literary allusions, and every time I read it I pick up on more of them. I always take the reading as an opportunity to read more of the books Janet mentions reading in her classes--my ultimate goal is to have read all of them. Every time I reread Tam Lin, I get a little closer, feel a little more well-read. I'm looking forward to college largely to have classes as an excuse to work my way towards this goal.

As for Helen--I rather enjoyed it, though I do think literature this old is the better for having a teacher to explain it. I should, I suppose, have read the introduction, but that felt like taking the momentum out of my impulse. I was rather surprised by my finishing the play itself. We'll see what else Tam Lin inspires me to impulse-read.

Going back a couple thousand years...

Here are the books I bought for one of my classes, Gender and Sexuality in Greek and Roman Lit. I'm really very excited for this. In case you can't read the titles well, we have...

Metamorphoses by Ovid, Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, The Odyssey by Homer, Women on the Edge: four plays by Euripides, and Games of Venus compiled by Peter Bing.

I'm pretty excited for all of them. I've read a play by Euripides, but not one of the ones in this collection. I'm sorry I haven't read The Illiad before reading Odyssey. I started it but got distracted, though I was quite enjoying it. Games of Venus is an anthology of Greek and Roman erotic poetry, which will no doubt be fascinating (isn't this exactly the sort of thing one is supposed to read the first quarter of college?).

Notice the yellow "used" stickers. I got there early enough to get them used, but they were still somewhere around 80 dollars all together. That's only one class. Oh, textbooks, putting fear in the heart of my wallet.

I've always wanted to read some of the classics (meaning the classical classics, not the English classics), so I'm glad I'm finally getting to.