Medea, Magic and Modernity in France: Stages and Histories (1553–1797) (review)

This is a thoughtful, well-researched and provocative study of Medea’s incarnations on the early modern stage. Wygant’s central argument is organized around three avatars of the ancient witch, each of whom conjures her own distinct vision of what it might mean to be ‘modern’. The first is an adept of rejuvenative magic. Here Wygant looks back to the episode recounted in Book VII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Medea restores to youth her father-in-law, Aeson. This is Renaissance Medea, killing in order to make live again, and around whom Wygant reads La Péruse’s La Médée (1553). The second Medea, that of Corneille’s Médée (1635), is a catoptromancer in whose magical mirror the nascent ‘public’ of seventeenth-century theatre sees, and consents to, its own future as a consumer of ‘illusions’. Third and last are the ‘Revolutionary’ Medeas of Cherubini and Diderot for whom, Wygant argues, ‘her [Medea’s] image stood for the very possibility of violent but real change’ (p. 192). Overall, this scheme is attractive and generally convincing. There are the odd weak moments, of which the weakest may concern some of the seventeenth-century material. Much of Wygant’s argument hinges on establishing a link — far from self-evident in the seventeenth century — between demonic and theatrical ‘illusion’. This she does (in Chapter 4, ‘The Question of Illusion’) by way of d’Aubignac’s early treatise on satyrs, a work on which Wygant has written persuasively elsewhere. In the context of this argument the connection that d’Aubignac is called upon to make appears slightly tenuous. Indeed, it is surprising that he is made to work this hard when Wygant had Corneille’s own L’Illusion comique (1635) so close at hand; that play, which prolongs the reflection on spectacle and magic begun in Médée a year before, receives no mention. More persuasive is the section on La Péruse — an exemplary piece of contextualized close reading. Finally: style, over which Wygant’s readers may be divided. Wygant’s writing is dense, allusive, and digressive. A bewildering array of subjects comes and goes in a flash: Oliver Stone, group psychology, Revlon, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Osama Bin Laden. Readers of an uncompromisingly historicist bent may find such associations especially enervating. They must also prepare to feel occasionally like the dim undergraduate for whom everything must be made ‘relevant’: e.g. ‘Circé would today gleefully avail herself of text-messaging, for she is a weaver and a singer, and so the very vision of text and its seductions’ (p. 13). That said, Wygant herself inveighs against ‘relevance’ for its own sake, and is also aware of the thinness of the line separating, in her words, ‘the necessarily speculative’ from the ‘delirious’. A more generous reading of this book might acknowledge that, as we begin to move beyond the New Historicist phase, the whole question of periodicity and of what constitutes proper context may again be up for grabs. And few literary characters have redefined their own contexts more insistently than Medea, a figure who, as Wygant’s study shows, offers captivating visions of our own modernity.