Part III

Motherhood in Fieri

Part 3 begins with a rereading of Medea’s motherhood in Heroides 12 as a continuous and open-ended process of construction, which happens in both the discursive and ontological dimension. The fluctuation between genders and literary genres, between maternal love and thirst for revenge, and the blurring of narratological levels articulate Medea’s perpetual, and at the same time unresolved, evolution as both a character in and the narrator of her story. Drawing on the posthuman notion of female subjectivity as a flux, chapter 6 explores Medea’s reinterpretation of her motherhood as a dynamic process. Leaving the question of Medea’s identity unresolved, the last line of Heroides 12 (“nescio quid certe mens mea maius agit,” Something greater, I do not know what, my mind is plotting; 212) suggests that a lack of determination and oscillation are intrinsic components of Medea’s personality. The construction of her identity as a female (posthuman) subject-in-becoming (i.e., a subject perpetually in the making and in self-definition, to put it in Rosi Braidotti’s words¹) differentiates the Heroidean version of Medea from her characterization in other works (including other Ovidian works). The ambiguous discourse and conflicting relationship with her motherhood, the reversals of expected familial and social roles, and the collapse of gender boundaries that prominently feature in Heroides 12—all these elements articulate Medea’s self-construction as an autonomous subject.

Following chapter 6’s exploration of how Medea renegotiates the relationship with her motherhood by casting her persona as a process of becoming in Heroides 12, chapter 7 analyzes Hypsipyle in Heroides 6 by focusing on the reconceptualization of her maternal body as a liminal space between subjectivity and objectivity. Besides the obvious intertextual and narrative connections between the two epistles (which are determined by the fact that Medea and Hypsipyle share the same addressee, Jason),² the trait d’union between these two heroines is that both seem to conceive their motherhood as a process of self-construction and development. While my analysis of Medea in Heroides 12 is informed, for the most part, by posthuman feminism, my examination of Hypsipyle’s epistle mainly draws from Bracha Ettinger’s recent theorizations on the maternal body. Accordingly, Hypsipyle’s maternity is interpreted as a liminal space that gives rise to a subjective encounter with her body, as well as the products of her body (her sons): this leads to her recovery and acknowledgment of her material (and maternal) body and subjectivity. Hypsipyle’s (re)appropriation of the reproductive process is articulated by another kind of production: the production of her artistic or literary work.

1. Braidotti 2002, passim.

2. See Hypsipyle’s long digressions on Medea in Her. 6 (31–50, 127–140, 149–164); for intertextual approaches to Her. 6 and 12, see, e.g., Bloch 2000, 197–209; Lindheim 2003, 114–133; Fulkerson 2005, 43–55; Vaïopoulos 2013, 122–148. This intertextual connection will be considered only to a limited extent in chapter 6, which focuses on Medea; it will be discussed more thoroughly in chapter 7, which examines Heroides 6.