Amy Levy’s Decadent ‘Medea’

Abstract

Abstract This essay focuses on Amy Levy’s 1882 ‘Medea. A Fragment after Euripides’, suggesting that the poem offers a meditation on decadence and its possibilities. Specifically, Levy examines its potential as a means of exploring the experiences of a cultural outsider, experiences that resonate with Levy’s own circumstances as an Anglo-Jewish New Woman whose primary attachments were to other women. While Medea had emerged from mid-Victorian literature and poems like Augusta Webster’s ‘Medea in Athens’ as a wronged woman whose victimization merits troubled sympathy, Levy develops a sceptical view of this interpretation. When Levy’s Medea pleas for sympathetic understanding, her listeners have none to offer the figure of racial and sexual otherness in their midst. Drawing from late-century revaluations of Euripides and his work by writers like John Addington Symonds, Levy restores Medea to her status as a decadent femme fatale. In doing so, she calls attention to the limitations of sympathy as a means of understanding while proposing decadence – a language of excess, irony, and ambiguity – as a language available to cultural outsiders for challenging their marginalization.