著者

小林 標

出版者

京都大学

雑誌

西洋古典論集 (ISSN:02897113)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.11, pp.185-211, 1994-03-30

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この論文は国立情報学研究所の学術雑誌公開支援事業により電子化されました。The object of this paper is to present a new viewpoint for Seneca's "Medea" and to study as well the nature of its influence over some "Medea" plays in Modern times. It is evident that Seneca's "Medea" owes very much to Euripides's masterpiece tragedy, but nonetheless it shows a clear break therefrom. Euripides created a shockingly powerful human tragedy, in which a once devoted wife, after suffering much because of the husband's betrayal, invents and executes the cruelest punishment for him one can ever imagine : the murder of her own children. Seneca, on his part, did not want to follow in the same footsteps when he tried to write a new "Medea" play. Perhaps we'd better say he could not, because all his literary audience must have had full knowledge of Medea's ultimate deed in Euripides's tragedy. And it would not have made sense for him to write a new play without considering the audience's knowledge of the story. We may be allowed to say that, after Euripides, the name ≪Medea≫ has become a sort of sign to signify ≪woman who kills her innocent children to punish the unfaithful husband whose life she spares≫. It was open to everybody to utilize this sign for writing a new play, but nobody could alter its meaning. So, for one thing, Seneca chose to omit from his version Euripides's Aegeus-scene in which Medea learns how much the children mean to the father ; he decided that, in the environment where everybody knew the heroine would eventually kill her children, the scene of "inventing" the kind of punishment by the heroine would not have as dramatic an impact on the audience as it did in Euripides's play. What Seneca presented instead was the repeated suggestion by Medea herself even in the prologue that she would murder her children. From the beginning of the play the readers or audience are made to confront the insinuation of the outcome they already know but don't want to see, and they are already in suspense. It was this suspenseful atmosphere that Seneca intended to create as the dramatic effect for his "Medea" when he wanted to compensate for the absence of the scene in which the punishment is invented. The well known significative value of the word ≪Medea≫ also made it possible for the author to write words such as "I will become Medea!" (171), or "Now I am Medea" (910) to convey the meaning that she is going to, or has determined to, kill her children. Expressions like ≪I will become Medea≫, ≪I am Medea≫ are also uttered by the heroines of the "Medea" plays of Corneille, Grillparzer and Anouilh. This is one example of the close relationship between Seneca's work and theirs, which has been more or less neglected. These Modern times dramatists had the same advantage and handicap as Seneca did when they wanted to write their "Medea" plays ; the audience already knew what the heroine would ultimately do. In other words, they were able to (and at the same time they had to) use the word ≪Medea≫ as a long established and too-well known sign. So, in the same course, they would rather rely on the dramatic effects invented by Seneca than those by Euripides. Actually, the influence Seneca's "Medea" exercised on these Modern times dramatists can be perceived in their borrowing not merely of the heroine's words from Seneca's work but also the principal framework of his plotting composition. The plotting of Seneca's "Medea", as I interpret it, is as follows ; a supernatural female marries a human male because of her juvenile love, and she tries hard to adapt herself to her husband's world. Eventually she encounters the ≪inescapable≫ betrayal of human beings, and she goes back to her own place after punishing the human world in her harshest way. In a more general and shorter expression, we can summarize it as the story of ≪an inevitable disintegration of an impossible marriage≫. In order to write a story of ≪impossible marriage≫, one must present two oppositive and unreconcilable worlds, which Seneca did in a meticulous way. First, Seneca reversed the heroine's character from the almost completely humanized one in Euripides's work to its mythical archetype, i. e. a sorceress with full witchcraft capacity and inclination. Furthermore, he set her in isolation not only in the actual condition but also in the concept of those who surround her. The Chorus is not only hostile to her in contrast to Euripides's version but also describes her as "the evil worse than the sea" (362) which mankind had not known before their first navigation to violate the sea. Jason is portrayed as being able to claim a certain amount of sympathy. He is being pursued by Acastus so that he is pressed, for the safety of himself and his children, to depend on the help of either Creo, i. e. his saviour from the human world's side, or Medea, i. e. from the nonhuman world's side. Medea tries to retrieve Jason to her own world with the declaration of her willingness to commit further crimes for his sake (525-528), but he chooses to belong to the human world and consequently deserts her. When Medea kills her children, it is not only to punish Jason, but also to severe all relationship with the human world. She asserts that any child she got by Jason is Creusa's (921-2). She also expresses her children as "quondam mei" (924) and "non mei" (934), which are quite contrastive to Medea's word "philoi" in the similar situation of Euripides's version (1250). Finally she casts down the bodies of her children to Jason, again in contrast to Euripides's, and the story of ≪impossible marriage≫ comes to a conclusion. In my opinion, it was Seneca's most valuable contribution to the history of "Medea" plays to transpose her story from that of ≪revenge of a wronged woman≫ into that of ≪an inevitable disintegration of an impossible marriage≫, and it is this kind of plotting that Corneille, Grillparzer and Anouilh owe most to Seneca. A shaky marriage with a nonhuman being (animal, specter, natural phenomenon personified etc.) disguised in human shape and its ultimate breakdown is the motif in many Japanese folktales, of which Lafcadio Hearn's "Yuki-Onna" is one example, and it is given a collective nomination as ≪irui-kon' in-tan≫ (roughly translated, ≪tale of marriage with an alien≫). ≪Irui-kon' in-tan≫ is not identical to the folktales in the West which are classified as the tales of ≪supernatural or enchanted spouse≫, because these are mostly about human beings who are temporarily forced to take disguise in nonhuman shape. Though I could not find the terminology in the Western languages that is exactly identical to ≪irui-kon' in-tan≫, there are literary pieces which could belong to this category in the West, too. As we saw, Seneca's "Medea" is an exemplary case. Fouque's "Undine" and its theatrical adaptation "Ondine" by Giraudoux are among other examples. Now, I would like to suggest broadening the implication of ≪iruikon' in-tan≫ to denote all the stories of ≪an inevitable disintegration of a marriage of a pair from two different worlds unreconcilable to each other≫, and to apply the concept to Occidental literature. Then we may be able to grasp more clearly, for one thing, the place Seneca's "Medea" occupies in the series of "Medea" plays. Among the three Modern dramatists mentioned, Anouilh employed the thematic scheme of ≪impossible marriage≫ more consciously than the others. The meaning of the fact that he borrowed many expressions directly from Seneca's work must be interpreted in correlation with this thematic borrowing. In my own terminology, Anouilh perceived Seneca's "Medea" as ≪irui-kon' in-tan≫, and he himself wrote his own version of the same motif.