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Medea, Hecate, Lady Macbeth, Medusa. . . why are these mythical sisters ubiquitous in Western culture? What are the implications of a deadly woman during the rise of nationhood? Do these rebel goddesses threaten patriarchal stability or are they, in the collective imaginary, necessary to maintain state power? These questions will inform our inquiry.

Our inquiry will focus on texts produced during historical periods of civil unrest. Despite the virility we tend to associate with war, it is the mythical woman who, in her various incarnations, often embodies the spirit of these revolutionary conflicts. Because of the subversive nature of civil uprising, however, she is not the welcoming, protective mother we have come to expect. Rather, the course will focus on the “dark side” of Lady Liberty, the witch, especially how she is portrayed in art and literature. We will analyze the witch as symbolic of the fears and insecurities ravaging the collective unconscious in times of political instability. The course will examine the gradual manifestation of the witch as the “dark side” of Lady Liberty in Western literature. We will use lenses of structuralism, feminism, and psychoanalysis in a quest to understand the power of her metaphor. In our journey from classical to modern, we will come to an appreciation of the way myth permeates our rhetoric of today.

Texts

• Medea. Euripides.
• Macbeth.  Shakespeare.
• The Sorceress. Jules Michelet.
• The Crucible. Arthur Miller.
• Nights at the Circus.  Angela Carter

Course Pack: shorter works and excerpts

• Malleus Maleficarum.
• “Remarks by the President on Iraq.” President Bush.
• Current newspaper articles/political speeches.
• “The Point of No Return” (lyrics).  Immortal Technique.
• “Centering Medea Amid Lawless Spaces.” William Pencak.
• “The Devil without Confessing Him.” Hélène Cixous.
• “The French Revolution. Millennium. Universal Redemption.” Coleridge.
• “The French Revolution.”  London Times, 1792.
• “Of the Sublime.” Edmund Burke.
• “On the pseudo-tragic: which is not sublime.” Longinus.
• “Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime.” Immanuel Kant.
• “Madame Lamort and the ultimate Medusa Experience.” Trees Depoorter.
• “Medusa’s Head.” Freud.
• “The Breast in Visual Representation: 1789 and After.”
• “The Bad Mother.” Lynn Hunt.
• Canon Episcopi.
• “Of Fear,” Montaigne.
• “Impotence and Witchcraft.” St. Thomas Aquinas.
• “Controlling Women’s Bodies: Violence and Sadism.”

Web Site

• Historical Contexts Folder: brief historical summaries for the periods including Greco-Roman wars, Renaissance and questions of legitimacy, French Revolution, McCarthyism, etc.
• Art Bank Folder: art images that relate to each work.
• Film Clips Folder: Digital clips of The Wizard of Oz, The Manchurian Candidate, etc.
• Individual Texts folders: Include all PowerPoints, class notes, supplementary readings, etc.