Medea: The Monomythic Antihero Cycle

Medea: The Monomythic Antihero Cycle

Joseph Campbell might well turn over in his grave to hear Medea's final murder of her children described as an example of the monomyth. Certainly, if one were to take into account other moments of Medea's life and her adventures with the argonauts, it would be possibly --though difficult-- to make such an argument seriously. However, arguing that Medea's tale as told by Euripides is an example of the monomyth at work seems rather blind to the fact that the hero cycle is meant to be about the exaltation, rather than the denial, of life. The problem may be as simple as the fact that Medea is female. Many critics have noted that, "Joseph Campbell is widely acclaimed for his conception of the hero's journey. However it addresses only half the population by excluding females," (Johnson) and that as such a different schema may be necessary for approaching a woman's experience. Medea is not a hero -- she is the goddess or temptress without whose aid a hero neither rises nor falls. Though it may be blasphemous to call Medea a traditional monomythic hero, all blasphemy is possible with enough imagination. If the reader is ready to invert the monomyth. Modern literature has brought us the idea of the "Anti-hero" whose adventures and plights display the underbelly of the world. By understanding Medea as such an antihero, one might understand her story as an anti-monomyth, which is to say a narrative which follows all of the steps of the monomyth but at each stage reverses their meanings.

The first phase of the monomyth are made clear immediately as the play begins. In the first stage of the monomyth, the hero is meant to be called to a departure or a separation; indeed Medea has just such an experience when her husband abandons her to remarry, and his father-in-law, Creon, informs her that she will be exiled. One is reminded powerfully at this point of the fact that in addition to being the center of her own anti-monomyth, Medea served as the Goddess in Jason's own epic quest for the golden fleece. In her despair, which is her own refusal of the call, we see an answer to the feminist question: "So much for the ambitions of the Hero. But what of the aspirations and desires of the Lady? What of her life before the arrival of the Prince? What brought her to that place at that time? How is her life to continue after the passing of the Hero?" (Johnson) Medea plots revenge, and here we see her own form of supernatural aid. Medea does not so much get help from outside as she makes her own aid, supernaturally. She uses magic to prepare the poisonous dress. She also uses magic to foretell a cure for Aegeus, so as to procure his promise of shelter when all is done. The crossing of the threshold is accomplished as she manages to convince Jason to take her two children and their poisonous gift into the inner sanctum of his new home. That her own husband should serve as the threshold guardian begins to portray the subtle way in which what (up until now) might look like a monomyth is about to take a gruesome turn away from anything which might be conceived as heroic. So the children, and with them symbolically Medea herself, enter into the very belly of the whale where they will confront Jason and his new wife. The first phase of the hero myth has proceeded rather traditionally, perhaps, if with a strange focus as the hero has not yet precisely left the city, and is remaining instead to take revenge on all those who sent her forth. This "rejection of the quest," is a little out of hand, one might say, as it seems to have transformed into the quest itself. However, it is the second phase, not the first, that really highlights how this is an anti-monomyth with an anti-hero.