In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Mother Medea and Her Children:Maternal Ambivalence in the Medean Plays of Marina Carr, Cherríe Moraga, and Rachel Cusk
• Verna A. Foster (bio)

Euripidean Medea as a Model for Maternal Ambivalence

When Euripides's Medea killed her children, she gave birth to a seemingly unending number of literary progeny over twenty-five centuries. Euripides's play is one of the most frequently performed Greek tragedies in Europe and America and has generated numerous translations and adaptations throughout the world, because in both translated and adapted forms this play in particular lends itself to some of the most pressing issues that have engaged the cultures that have reworked it. Over the last five centuries, as Fiona Macintosh explains, versions of Euripides's play have successively emphasized Medea as witch, infanticide, abandoned wife, protofeminist, outsider, and latterly as an amalgam of these earlier manifestations.¹ Euripides's Medea killed her children to deprive her husband, Jason, of posterity because he abandoned her for a younger royal bride. The vengeance of a foreign woman scorned still shadows contemporary Medeas, who continue to appear as feminists, as ethnic and cultural others, and as exemplars of the dispossessed fighting back.² However, in the popular imagination, Medea is first and foremost the mother who kills her own children. Three recent versions of Euripides's play, while still evoking the multiple ways in which Medea resonates with contemporary concerns, address in particular the maternal ambiguity that finds its most extreme symbolic expression in infanticide. Marina [End Page 83] Carr's By the Bog of Cats … (1998), Cherríe Moraga's The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2000), and Rachel Cusk's Medea (2015) critique the coercive norms of patriarchal motherhood as it exists, respectively, in late twentieth-century Catholic Ireland, Chicanx America, and contemporary England. These critiques are advanced from the viewpoints of the Medean mothers, each of whom is motivated by her own particular circumstances and her own understanding of motherhood. By focusing on their protagonists' individual experiences as mothers; complicating their motives for committing infanticide; and developing the roles their children play, Carr, Moraga, and Cusk illuminate, from different perspectives, why Medea offers audiences an important resource for coming to terms with the conflicts of contemporary motherhood.

In Euripides's dramatization of the elemental conflict between maternal love and vengeful infanticide, Medea is motivated to kill her children chiefly by wounded pride—"I will not let my enemies laugh at me"—but also by a sense of divine justice—"The gods and I / devised this strategy" to punish Jason for his oath-breaking, as she says of her revenge.³ The complexity of her feelings and her self-awareness (she is the only character in extant Greek tragedies to talk to herself) give Euripides's rendering of the Medea myth its peculiar power to generate new versions of Medean motherhood in a variety of social, historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. There is no question that, viscerally, Medea loves her children: "Oh, how I love these hands, how I love these mouths, / the way the children stand, their noble faces!" (1094-95). She has to steel herself to kill them, and she knows that she will suffer the pain of their loss. However, from the beginning of the play, Medea's feelings about her children and about motherhood are ambivalent. Describing her mistress's suffering, the Nurse says, "She hates her children, feels no joy in seeing them" (42). Medea wishes for the children's death even before she thinks of killing them herself: "O children, accursed, / may you die—with your father!" (118–19). And, famously, Medea tells the Women of Corinth, "I'd rather take my stand behind / a shield three times than go through childbirth once" (253–54). She asserts that it is safer as well as more desirable to be an arms-bearing man than a childbearing woman. Medea's murder of her children cannot be excused as madness. She consciously "work[s] up [her] nerve / for overwhelming evil," asserting, "my spirit/ [End Page 84] is stronger than my mind's deliberations" (1101–03).

Medea's intellectual honesty, complex reasoning, and emotional turmoil make her a particularly compelling paradigm for...

中文翻译：

---

美狄亚母亲和她的孩子：玛丽娜·卡尔、切丽·莫拉加和雷切尔·库斯克的美狄亚戏剧中的母性矛盾

代替摘要，这里是内容的简短摘录：

• 美狄亚母亲和她的孩子：玛丽娜·卡尔、切丽·莫拉加和雷切尔·库斯克的美狄亚戏剧中的母性矛盾
• Verna A.福斯特（生物）

欧里庇得美狄亚作为母性矛盾的模型

当欧里庇得斯的美狄亚杀死她的孩子时，她在二十五个世纪里生下了数量似乎无穷无尽的文学后代。欧里庇得斯的戏剧是欧洲和美洲最常上演的希腊悲剧之一，在世界范围内产生了无数的翻译和改编，因为无论是翻译还是改编形式，这部戏剧都特别适合解决一些最紧迫的问题已经对其进行改造的文化。在过去的五个世纪里，正如 Fiona Macintosh 所解释的那样，欧里庇得斯的戏剧版本相继强调美狄亚是女巫、杀婴、被遗弃的妻子、原始女性主义者、局外人，后来又是这些早期表现的混合体。¹欧里庇得斯的美狄亚杀死了她的孩子，以剥夺她的丈夫杰森的后代，因为他为了一个年轻的皇室新娘而抛弃了她。一个被蔑视的外国女性的复仇仍然笼罩着当代美狄亚，她们继续以女权主义者、种族和文化他人的身份出现，以及被剥夺者反击的典范。²然而，在大众的想象中，美狄亚首先是杀死自己孩子的母亲。欧里庇得斯戏剧的三个最新版本，在仍然唤起美狄亚与当代关注产生共鸣的多种方式的同时，特别解决了在杀婴中找到其最极端象征性表达的母性模糊性。Marina [End Page 83] Carr's By the Bog of Cats ...（1998 年）、Cherríe Moraga 的《饥饿的女人：墨西哥美狄亚》（2000 年）和雷切尔·库斯克（Rachel Cusk）的《美狄亚》（2015 年）分别批评了 20 世纪后期天主教爱尔兰、美国奇坎克斯和当代存在的父权制母亲的强制性规范英国。这些批评是从 Medean 母亲的观点出发的，每个人的动机都是她自己的特殊情况和她自己对母性的理解。通过关注主角作为母亲的个人经历；使他们的杀婴动机复杂化；Carr、Moraga 和 Cusk 从不同的角度阐明了为什么美狄亚为观众提供了一个重要的资源来应对当代母亲的冲突。

在欧里庇得斯对母爱和报复性杀婴之间的基本冲突的戏剧化中，美狄亚主要是出于受伤的自尊心——“我不会让我的敌人嘲笑我”——但也出于一种神圣的正义感——“众神”。我/设计了这个策略”来惩罚杰森的誓言，正如她在谈到她的复仇时所说的那样。³她感情的复杂性和她的自我意识（她是现存希腊悲剧中唯一一个自言自语的角色）使欧里庇得斯对美狄亚神话的渲染具有独特的力量，可以在各种社会、历史、地理和文化背景。毫无疑问，美狄亚发自内心地爱她的孩子：“哦，我多么喜欢这些手，我多么喜欢这些嘴，/孩子们站立的方式，他们高贵的脸庞！” (1094-95)。她必须坚强自己才能杀死他们，她知道她将承受失去他们的痛苦。然而，从剧一开始，美狄亚对她的孩子和母亲的感情是矛盾的。描述她的情妇的痛苦，护士说，“她讨厌她的孩子，看到他们没有快乐”（42）。哦孩子们，该死的，/愿你死——和你的父亲一起！”（118-19）。而且，著名的是，美狄亚告诉科林斯的妇女，“我宁愿三次站在盾牌后面，也不愿经历一次分娩”（253-54）。她断言这样更安全以及比起生育妇女更值得成为一个有武器的男人。美狄亚谋杀她的孩子不能被原谅为疯狂。她有意识地“锻炼[她]的神经/为了压倒性的邪恶，”断言，“我的精神/ [结束第 84 页]比我的思想更强大”（1101-03）。

美狄亚的智慧诚实、复杂的推理和情绪动荡使她成为一个特别引人注目的范式……