Euripides’ Songs of Nether Darkness:“Truth,” Disunion, and Madness in Medea and Hippolytus

• Main Authors: Yu-yun Wu, 吳瑜雲
• Other Authors: I-min Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/34931352652476872696

博士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系博士班 === 95 === This dissertation attempts to assert that Euripides poses as a poet to represent the topics of uncertainty, conflict, and madness. Here my study is to illustrate that Euripidean Medea and Hippolytus underscore a mostly intricate rendezvous of the Greek practice of parrhesia, the disturbing disunion on various potential possibilities, and the abiding occurrence of the female resistance and madness in a pallogocentric community as demonstrated in the plot development, central themes, and character portrayal. Foucault manifests parrhesia as the verbal activity of truth-speaking with the five major qualities of frankness, truth, criticism, obligation, and risk-taking. By discussing the concept and practice of the Greek notion of parrhesia, political or personal, I intend to investigate the word’s use in Hippolytus and Medea to shed new light on revealing the ambivalence of truth-telling and truth-hiding as well as the ambiguity of truth and falsehood in these two plays. In addition, by applying Hegelian concept of tragedy and the predominantly Greek gender protocols, I would demonstrate that Euripidean tragedy establishes the structure’s penchant: the tragic characters cling to the dominion of their fixed “pathos” (“the feeling soul”) from the outset in the confrontation of the painful Others, and entertain no absolute accommodation between the protagonist and the antagonist. Clearly, the obsessive natures of Medea and Jason or Phaedra and Hippolytus are formulated in irreconcilable opposition and hostile conforntations. Besides, by virtue of the Hegelian theory of madness, I would declare that the tragic heroine in madness is trapped between two centers of reality (the discord between the inner and outer worlds), and that the mad self disrupts herself to experience a double personality. Thus, we’ll see “a double doubleness”: a divided personality that compliments a divided world. Furthermore, in light of the polarized ideology of gender (the system of dualism), I argue that female public invisibility, negativity, suffering, and the Gestalt of despair in a definitively male-oriented world precipitate Medea’s and Phaedra’s desperate resistance against the cultural norms and their exerting the stratagem of passionate madness; it is a gesture of both protest and a healing recovery from the wounds and agonies of the spirit to articulate their demands for esteem and self-identity. The concluding part of this study suggests that Euripides has been both remote and contemporary. His eternal songs splendidly explore the radical disunion and darkening madness of female existence, which are elaborated with a timeless relevance of glorious struggle for survival and triumph.