The above quote was spoken by Medea in Euripides' play of the same name. In this play, he tells the tale of Medea -- who, for love of Jason, betrayed her family and did them violence to help him steal the Golden Fleece. Then, when she had wed him and borne him two children, he spurned her for her foreignness and married the daughter of Creon. In her rage, she killed his new wife, her father, and the two sons she had borne him. Hell hath no fury indeed...
Some time ago I wrote about a dream catalog of courses I would someday like to teach. The fun thing about where I work is that we are often encouraged and supported to reach for those dreams and make them come true. So, it is with pleasure that I’m currently spending the fall semester planning for a course that will come this spring. Its unofficial name is “Women Who Kill” and it will be co-taught with a friend of mine in the psychology department. I know it sounds weird, but bear with me.
My side of the class will be primarily steeped in mythology and literature. My colleague will be focusing on real life cases of women who feel they have no other choice but to kill. We are still working out the details of what we will be covering, but the thing that bridges the real with the story can be summed up with a snippet from The Power of Myth. This was the title of an interview that took place at the George Lucas residence Skywalker Ranch wherein veteran journalist Bill Moyers spoke at length with Joseph Campbell – one of the leading scholars on mythology. Campbell told us that “[t]he myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth” (40). Here is the overlap of her world and mine. I have been studying mythology and archetypes for a very long time, and the way these things intertwine with what is called (for lack of a better term) the ‘real world’ is fascinating. Much of what we do not consciously know shows up in our dreams and myths and they are reflections of all the things we value and fear as human beings. So, when someone deviates from what we understand to be sane and normal, we react in a way that belies these almost primal concerns. The roots of this acidity lie in the Magna Mater – the Great Mother. The Great Goddess.
The female has long been given a rather limited and yet powerful status in a world largely controlled by men. Their power comes from within in a lot of ways – rather than outward power given to them by society and the ruling strata. The power of women often lies in beauty and sexuality/fertility – and this is echoed in the myths we tell of women and the sway they hold over men. A woman wronged – or locked into a situation from which she cannot easily escape – responds in ways that chill us to the bone. We are filled with vitriol and condemnation, for her spilling of blood seems to violate our most basic image of nurturing feminine power. We have, in our society, forgotten that the female, at its core, contained three facets – the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Before the patriarchal world in which we live, these were three powerful and intertwined facets revered and valued. A three-sided Great Goddess who was formed in the figure of the earth which gave life at its coupling with the sky. She is the heavens, the earth, and the underworld. She represents birth, death, and regeneration. As time plodded on, the three facets split and became, more often than not, the virgin / the wife / the whore. Her role became defined through its relationship with the male. She would never really recover from this and her darker side became a monster rather than a natural part of life. We are faced with such grim visages as Medusa, Kali, and Lilith. When we turn from ancient tales of ancient peoples to what we face in our own world, we see this same demonizing of the feminine – and the same vitriol poured upon those whom we have determined as violators of the sacred role of the female, the most sacred bonds of love and motherhood. Andrea Yates, Susan Smith, Casey Anthony, Aileen Wuornos. Statistically less common, the female killer fascinates and repels in equal measure and begs questions we hope to explore. Is what drives these women to kill (or be judged as killers) the same thing that drives men to kill? What is the psychological reality of the mythological and literary rendering of the woman who ends life when we value her as the one who creates it? Are her beauty and her sexuality at the core of the woman who kills – or is she just another human, a symptom of her environment? Murder is always about control – but the nature of that control changes with she or he who wields it and therein lies our exploration. Not to celebrate or to glorify – but to examine and to study. Not to demonize men, but rather to ‘undemonize’ the woman in the hopes that, in rendering her once again a woman, we can understand her as a human being who was broken, damaged, psychologically fractured.
"And now it comes to it at last. You will give me the One Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord, you will set up a Queen, and I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night. Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain...all shall love me and despair!" – Galadriel in JRR Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring
My side of the class will be primarily steeped in mythology and literature. My colleague will be focusing on real life cases of women who feel they have no other choice but to kill. We are still working out the details of what we will be covering, but the thing that bridges the real with the story can be summed up with a snippet from The Power of Myth. This was the title of an interview that took place at the George Lucas residence Skywalker Ranch wherein veteran journalist Bill Moyers spoke at length with Joseph Campbell – one of the leading scholars on mythology. Campbell told us that “[t]he myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth” (40). Here is the overlap of her world and mine. I have been studying mythology and archetypes for a very long time, and the way these things intertwine with what is called (for lack of a better term) the ‘real world’ is fascinating. Much of what we do not consciously know shows up in our dreams and myths and they are reflections of all the things we value and fear as human beings. So, when someone deviates from what we understand to be sane and normal, we react in a way that belies these almost primal concerns. The roots of this acidity lie in the Magna Mater – the Great Mother. The Great Goddess.
The female has long been given a rather limited and yet powerful status in a world largely controlled by men. Their power comes from within in a lot of ways – rather than outward power given to them by society and the ruling strata. The power of women often lies in beauty and sexuality/fertility – and this is echoed in the myths we tell of women and the sway they hold over men. A woman wronged – or locked into a situation from which she cannot easily escape – responds in ways that chill us to the bone. We are filled with vitriol and condemnation, for her spilling of blood seems to violate our most basic image of nurturing feminine power. We have, in our society, forgotten that the female, at its core, contained three facets – the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Before the patriarchal world in which we live, these were three powerful and intertwined facets revered and valued. A three-sided Great Goddess who was formed in the figure of the earth which gave life at its coupling with the sky. She is the heavens, the earth, and the underworld. She represents birth, death, and regeneration. As time plodded on, the three facets split and became, more often than not, the virgin / the wife / the whore. Her role became defined through its relationship with the male. She would never really recover from this and her darker side became a monster rather than a natural part of life. We are faced with such grim visages as Medusa, Kali, and Lilith. When we turn from ancient tales of ancient peoples to what we face in our own world, we see this same demonizing of the feminine – and the same vitriol poured upon those whom we have determined as violators of the sacred role of the female, the most sacred bonds of love and motherhood. Andrea Yates, Susan Smith, Casey Anthony, Aileen Wuornos. Statistically less common, the female killer fascinates and repels in equal measure and begs questions we hope to explore. Is what drives these women to kill (or be judged as killers) the same thing that drives men to kill? What is the psychological reality of the mythological and literary rendering of the woman who ends life when we value her as the one who creates it? Are her beauty and her sexuality at the core of the woman who kills – or is she just another human, a symptom of her environment? Murder is always about control – but the nature of that control changes with she or he who wields it and therein lies our exploration. Not to celebrate or to glorify – but to examine and to study. Not to demonize men, but rather to ‘undemonize’ the woman in the hopes that, in rendering her once again a woman, we can understand her as a human being who was broken, damaged, psychologically fractured.
"And now it comes to it at last. You will give me the One Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord, you will set up a Queen, and I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night. Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain...all shall love me and despair!" – Galadriel in JRR Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring
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Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. Ed. Betty Sue Flowers. New York:Doubleday, 1988. Print.
Euripides. "Medea." Classical Mythology: Images and Insights. Eds. Stephen L. Harris and Gloria Platzner. 4th Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2001. 761-799. Print.
