Come, Medea, to be, to pass, to matter: Euripides and Agostinho Olavo.
Ana Rodríguez Santory, 2020
Euripides’ Medea is about a lot of things: the wretched social condition of women, the bonds of oaths, the trappings of heroism, the righteousness of vengeance, and the dangers of discourse. As perhaps the most widely known play of Euripides, it still startles us with the moral shock of its conclusion — probably as much as it surprised the original audience in 431BCE. No one expected Medea to kill her own children only to fly off into the horizon — terrible and triumphant. Like many ancient texts, Medea is still part of contemporary transgressive dialogues: it does more than evoke the past; it also creates new spaces and registers for the negotiation of identity — moral, social, historical, aesthetic, and even political. This thesis seeks to build upon previous approaches to Euripides’ play in order to understand better why it was so widely received by Latin American writers in the second half of the 20th century. To begin, I focus on Euripidean Medea’s mastery of discourse, her claim to agency, and her problematization of identity binaries — characteristics that are key for our understanding of Latin American Medeas. Of these, I analyze Agostinho Olavo’s Além do Rio (Medea), a nearly forgotten Brazilian work of the Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), as an example of the literature that sought to articulate young Latin American countries vis à vis their former empires — while also negotiating their own self-determining narratives during the fluid socio-political landscape of the 20th century — by making use of Euripides’s Medea: the other among us and the other within us.