Medea's Daughters: Forming and Performing the Woman Who Kills by Jennifer Jones (review)

334 REVIEWS Revolution, and Erikson with a stimulating exploration of the relationship between theatricality and rhetoricity, drama, and political action though a consideration of Habermas and Foucault. The remaining three essays utilize the concept of theatricality to examine performative activity in three theatrical cultures widely separated in time and location, thus developing the wide view of the concept laid out in the introduction . The aim is by no means to develop any kind of general or universal idea of what "theatricality" is, but rather, and properly, to provide thoughtful "case studies" of how theatricality has operated within specific historical and cultural situations. This is surely the best way to develop some idea of both the genealogy and the theoretical and esthetic potential of this fascinating and protean concept. In the first of these essays, Jody Enders considers the operations of mimesis in the medieval passion drama of Valenciennes, focusing particularly upon the stage presentation of biblical miracles. Here the concept of theatricality allows her to explore some of the most basic questions about the nature of theatrical illusion, reception, and belief. The theory and practice of illusion and reception is explored in a totally different historical and geographical situation by Haiping Jan, who looks at the dialectics of theatricality in classical Chinese music-drama. In addition to providing importanllight upon these concerns in a non-Western context, Jan's essay offers the further attraction of a thoughtful study of the implications of Bertolt Brecht's appropriation of and misunderstanding ofcertain operating techniques of this rich theatrical tradition. Thomas Postlewait caslS important new light on an area that will be more familiar to most of the book's readers - the complex terrain of theatricality and anti-theatricality in Renaissance London. Postlewait is one of ourbestwriters on the subject of theatre historiography and the implications ofdifferent approaches to the process of remembering and writing about theatre, and this subject provides him with an excellent opportunity not only to discuss the complicated relationship of these competing terms within the Elizabethan context, but even more useful and more intriguing, the way this relationship has been articulated and remembered by modern historians, whose idea of what constitutes theatricality has of course also been strongly conditioned by their own cultural context. There is not a weak essay in this excellent collection, and anyone interested in sampling some of the best work in contemporary theatre and performance history and theory will want to own a copy of it. JENNIFER JONES. Medea's Daughters: Forming and Per/arming the Woman Who Kills. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Pp. 123. $23·95 (Pb). Reviewed by PenllY Falfan, University ofCalgary According to Aristotle, the best subjects for tragedy are to be found in a "few Reviews 335 houses" - those that include Oedipus, Orestes, and Thyestes, for example - "and those others who have done or suffered something terrible" (42). In Medea's Daughters: Forming and Performing the Woman Who Kills, Jennifer Jones explores the enduring fascination of the figure of the murderous woman by considering how certain historical personages have been recast in the cultural imagination as metaphoric descendents of one of antiquity's most notorious mythic families. Positing the "classic drag" role (Case 5-27) of Euripides' Medea as a hegemonic "icon for female criminality" whose "'man-made' monstrousness deflects the patriarchal acknowledgement of women's legitimate anger at being designated ' less than' men" (Jones ix), Jones traces a representational genealogy from ancient times to the present day, supporting and enriching readings of plays and television programs through comparative analysis against historical documents ranging from criminological texts to popular press accounts of legal trials. The resulting book is an engaging contribution to feminist cultural studies. Jones' thesis is that cultural representations of women accused of murder have typically "been used to contain and control cultural anxiety evoked by the disturbing figure of the female killer" (x), who unsettles conventional gender ideology by the very fact of her existence and who thus poses a threat to the male-dominated social order. The book begins with the case of Alice Arden, who was convicted of "the conflated crime of adultery and murder" and whose story is apparently "the earliest extant dramatic...