Cambridge Scholars Publishing The Tragic Life Story of Medea as Mother, Monster, and Muse

This volume offers a critical yet empathic exploration of the ancient myth of Medea as immortalized by early Greek and Roman dramatists to showcase the tragic forces afoot when relational suffering remains unresolved in the lives of individuals, families and communities. Medea as a tragic figure, whose sense of isolation and betrayal interferes with her ability to form healthy attachments, reveals the human propensity for violence when the agony of unresolved grief turns to vengeance against those we hold most dear. However, metaphorically, her life story as an emblem for existential crisis serves as a psychological touchstone in the lives of early twentieth-century female authors, who struggled to find their rightful place in the world, to resolve the sorrow of unrequited love and devotion, and to reconcile experiences of societal abandonment and neglect as self-discovery. Review “In The Tragic Life Story of Medea as Mother, Monster, and Muse, Jana Rivers-Norton effectively peels back the many layers of the Medea motif from its classical construction to its contemporary manifestations to reveal the “troubled” and often “troubling” relationship between mothers and daughters explored in the work of four American feminist and pre-feminist authors across multiple genres―poets H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louise Bogan and fiction writer Ellen Glasgow, with Toni Morrison receiving a tangential, but welcome, glance. The author speculates through her exploration how Medea’s “negation” as monster-mother through time may mask Medea once enlightening essence as earth mother and psychic and spiritual healer. The result, then, as Rivers-Norton’s analysis argues, has been a mixed bag of personal and artistic conflicts and crises for each woman, borne out in the lives and work of the author’s subjects. Mother-daughter relationships may be the cause of tremendous pain and a sense of loss, but also a stimulus for further artistic expression and emotional growth, the text conveys. The journey through the works of these women also presents an opportunity for Rivers-Norton to explore her own conflicts with the past.”Professor Mark Alan GravesDepartment of English, Communications, Media and Languages, Morehead State University“Jana Rivers-Norton’s undertaking in The Tragic Life Story of Medea as Mother, Monster, and Muse uncovers the urgency of redemptive storytelling through an exploration of female artists ranging from Hilda Doolittle to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This fascinating portrayal of modern reincarnations of the Medea myth is a splendid and vital interdisciplinary addition to the feminist canon.”Hannah HuberPostdoctoral Research Associate, Institute for the Humanities and University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago“[The book] examines how painful familial and other emotional traumas can result in exquisite art, a topic I find perennially fascinating. Kierkegaard’s magnificent articulation of the poetic artist in Either/Or came to mind as I read the book: “What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ - that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful’.” […] Rivers Norton writes a moving narrative of women whose prose and verse express their intense personal conflict in such a way that, like Kierkegaard’s imagined audience, I too say “Sing again soon.” As a result of reading The Tragic Life Story of Medea as Mother, Monster and Muse, I want to learn more about, and to read the works of, the authors whose lives Rivers Norton presents with such loving detail. […] Rivers Norton offers a poignant narrative of women who survived trauma through literature, a narrative that reflects her own profound expe