Ordinary Voices: the Mocking of Myth in For Her Dark Skin

Abstract

This article explores Percival Everett’s use of the Medea myth and the way in which Everett’s ironic treatment of the myth reveals essential aspects of the use of myth in a postmodern context. While the characters in Everett’s rewriting of the Medea myth seem incapable of understanding the nature of myth as Mircea Eliade describes it, as the «various and sometimes dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred (or the “supernatural’) into the world», they find themselves trapped by language, which in the postmodern view of narrative has become the equivalent of fate. While Everett’s approach reinforces our awareness of the fictionality of all that was formerly seen as reality (and myth was initially seen as real), it also lays bare the survival of myth at an unconscious level in modern society. Most importantly Everett shows the way in which questions of gender and race lie rooted in the mysterious past of humanity, in the dark region where myths were born.