When Are Children Worth It?: An Evolutionary Reading of Euripides' Medea

WHEN ARE CHILDREN WORTH IT? AN EVOLUTIONARY READING OF EURIPIDES' MEDEA R. BRIAN SOMMERVILLE * The primary aim of this paper is to present a new way of looking at an ancient play. Most psychological interpretations of classical Greek drama have been more or less directly influenced by the psychoanalytical model of the mind that was articulated by Freud and his followers earlier this century. The mode ofcriticism employed in this paper follows directly from the postulates of a newer movement in psychology that has the dual advantage ofa stronger theoretical backing from the natural sciences and a more accurate and comprehensive account ofhuman motivation across time and culture. This movement, known as evolutionary psychology, proposes a biologized model of the mind that impressively reinterprets and integrates a great diversity of formerly unintelligible and paradoxical observations of human behavior. In the following discussion ofEuripides' Medea, evolutionary psychology will be used to cast new light on some of the dramatic conflicts within this historically problematic text, as well as to support a novel interpretation of Medea's notorious crime of child-murder. In brief, it will be argued that her deed may be understood as the drastic but rationally intelligible action of a biological "strategist" concerned with her lifetime reproductive output. In conclusion, some ideas will be offered about how evolutionary psychology can refine and expand our conceptions of tragedy and tragic drama. Infanticide In Literature and Life The killing of one's own children is a behavior that flouts commonsense and common values. By contradicting common intuitions about the unshakeable beneficence of parental emotions, infanticidal parents have inspired some of our society's bitterest moral condemnations—just think of The author would like to thank Professor Bennett Simon, MD, of Harvard University, for his stimulating conversation, teaching, and book, as well as for encouraging the author to write on a topic about which he is passionate. *Dept. of Psychology, Green Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08344.© 1999 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/99/4204-1114$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 43, 1 ¦ Autumn 1999 69 how we reacted to Susan Smith. Indeed, as Steven Pinker has noted recently , it is a mother's murder of her young that is an especially shocking act, seemingly an "ultimate violation of the natural order" that could only be attributed to psychopathology [I]. In line with such impressions, modern attempts at explaining maternal infanticide have typically sought extreme and morbid motivations in the women, fictive or actual, who have committed this heartbreaking act. Psychoanalysis, for example, has understood infanticide as ultimately deriving from a woman's pathological revenge wishes against her husband. Writing around the peak of Freud's influence on general medical diagnosis, Edward S. Stern cited a woman's "Medea complex," or death wishes for her children, as responsible not only for infanticide, but for spontaneous abortions, pain upon sexual intercourse , and various forms of child neglect and cruelty [2] . In patients presenting with any of the above, the psychiatrist Stern recommended that "a search should always be made for a conscious or unconscious hatred of the husband." Modern critics of Euripides' Medea have generally relied on some form of the infanticide-as-revenge hypothesis in attempting to account for the murderous behavior of the play's protagonist. And indeed, given the way Medea is treated by her husband Jason, it is not hard to imagine how she could be brutally angry with him. After all, in his blinding infatuation with ayounger woman,Jason has cruelly abandoned Medea and the two sons she bore him, leaving them as helpless strangers in Corinth while he meanwhile marries into the Corinthian king's household and encourages the king to exile his erstwhile family. "The man who was everything to me," a devastated Medea responds, "has turned out to be the basest of men" [3]. Though such a brazen thumbing of the nose at husbandly commitment would understandably provoke any woman's rage, critics have also noted that Medea is notjust any woman—in fact, she has a "melodramatic criminal record" that includes the killing and dismemberment of her own brother as a means of facilitating her elopement with...