Excerpted introduction to “The Body of (Dis)content: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Study of Murder & the Mother-Body in Medea,” one part of a dual thesis project entitled “The Book is a Body, the Palm the Page.”

To utter the name Medea is to evoke images like those printed on tarot cards: a woman collapsed in despair; a woman rigid with fury; a mother quiet with contemplation; a mother clutching the bloodied bodies of her children. Contemporary readers might render ancient Medea as a tabloid monster or the archetypal betrayed housewife. Despite any temporal framework, Medea was and is woman and mother, contained in a body, a body drawn and quartered by language. 

One comes to know Medea through the page and through performance. She is a textual being and yet was created in order to be embodied by others, cast and recast over time. Much like a flesh and blood woman, her image shifts according to fluctuations in the words used to describe her. 

Medea’s tragedy is to be both read and performed. In the act of reading a literary work, the page is vulnerable. For all of its words, it cannot speak back. As one watches a play, the fourth wall serves as barrier. A member of the audience may object to the director’s interpretation but is nevertheless restricted to her role as silent viewer. The actors, meanwhile, replay a drama for perhaps the ten thousandth time, and it is in this repetition that generations of audiences are implicated in a linguistic, literary, social history. Repetition constructs, it aids and abets the survival of certain beliefs, assumptions, habits, and laws; to read and interpret Medea is to commit a repetition. What justifies this reiterated investigation is the not-knowing. What seems to be and what actually is are two different things, and so there is always room for rediscovery.

My particular reading of Medea, both the woman and the text, is caught up in this fever for rediscovery, re-cognition. A crucial element in my study of psychoanalysis is the searching, the endless untangling that always results in more knots, more puzzles, more layered collages of questions and possibility. My methods of navigation are my love of literature and language, and my hunger for psychoanalytic illumination. I believe in these tools because of their deeply human(e) focus on matters of the heart, the voice, the body, and the psyche. 

In the excavation of this text, Medea’s bones have much to show us. At the core of both Medea and psychoanalysis is the very question of love. For if psychoanalysis raises truths, and we are in fact split subjects, unknowable even to ourselves, then how is love wrought? How does the the mother-body come to be, how is it branded by words and bound to social, cultural, and political networks, and how do these circumstances influence woman’s desire to annihilate the fruit of her own being?

The power of psychoanalysis lies in its attempt to reveal the unspeakable and to do so with respect for unconscious truth, no matter the horror. Indeed, what Medea does is horrific – she murders her two sons in order to strike back at her adulterous husband. This cannot be dismissed as an isolated crime; she is implicit within a history of the female body (which must take into account both life and death), specifically the maternal body, and her act cannot be divorced from that. 

This is not to say that what she does is fair. It is worth pointing out, however, that psychoanalysis strives to comprehend systems of logic that privilege other, and perchance graver, ideas over that of fairness. This reading is not only a psychoanalytic critique of the mother-body as it is found in Medea, but an interrogation of the very concept of naturalized motherly love. We must consider Lacan’s understanding of desire and lack, for desire emerges from the lack inflicted by the individual’s subjection to language and castration from the mother through the Name-of-the-Father. All components in the relationship that consists in the continual construction of the woman-body and the mother-body. 

Jacques Lacan’s theory of sexuation, along with Freud’s writings on sexuality and Julia Kristeva’s feminist texts, serve as a compelling tool for this consideration. To conduct a psychoanalytic reading of a literary work is to treat each sentence, each paragraph, as if it were a body. That is to say, the vigilant reader locates double meanings, just as a listener may second guess what she is hearing out of another’s mouth, or scrutinize her conversational partner’s gestures and mannerisms. The person speaking and moving intends to convey her statements in a certain way, though will not necessarily be understood according to that intention. The author of a work puts forth the text as she believes it to carry truth, but that work will never be immune from the unconscious materials of the reader. From this perspective, to write and to speak are dangerous acts.

To this end, one can see how the text and the reader interact unconsciously, since the unconscious, as Lacan defined it, subtly (and at times not so subtly) intrudes upon our every experience in ways we cannot wholly imagine, and this includes our daily reading of texts.

To look at this drama in its written form and then describe its contents to you (another reader) through the lens I have chosen to adopt, is to find myself in a spiral of association. This is not an exploration of the text’s unconscious, or Euripides’ unconscious, or even my own unconscious. Regardless of my intention to not enter into this territory, the unconscious will undoubtedly have its say.

I, like Medea, am housed in a form, which I have come to see as a woman-body. The body has its possessions, unbeknownst to its inhabitant. As I pry open Medea’s chest, crowbar in one hand and pen in the other, I am also prying open my own. The challenge here lies in the imagining of Medea’s act and what it means for love, specifically the love of a mother for her child. For this is the most glorified form of love, the love that is supposed to be enduring, unconditional, intrinsic. We are all concerned in this narrative – we are all of us children.