A Contemporary Myth (In Which I Write About Greek Mythology and Sylvia Plath Again)

Aftermath - Sylvia Plath

Compelled by calamity’s magnet

They loiter and stare as if the house

Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought

Some scandal might any minute ooze

From a smoke-choked closet into light;

No deaths, no prodigious injuries

Glut these hunters after an old meat,

Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.

Mother Medea in a green smock

Moves humbly as any housewife through

Her ruined apartments, taking stock

Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery:

Cheated of the pyre and the rack,

The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.

In this poem, once again, Sylvia Plath combines themes of both women’s issues and Greek mythology. This time, she uses a Greek epic to discuss the concept of the 1950s housewife. In addition, she also shows her disdain for people who clamor to see a tragedy that has taken place, rather than taking the time to offer respect and condolences to those affected. To showcase this, as well as the housewives she saw in many of the women around her, she uses the story of Medea.

In mythology, Medea is the wife of Jason, of Jason and the Argonauts. She is often portrayed as a priestess or an enchantress, and she is the granddaughter of Helios, the god of the sun. The most famous story involving Medea is one in which her husband abandons her when the king of Corinth offers him his daughter’s hand in marriage. As revenge, Medea murders their children.

The murders are a horrific tragedy, and if the story took place in modern times, it is what Medea’s neighbors would “loiter and stare at the house” to see. Words like “ooze”, “smoke-choked”, “glut”, and “blood-spoor” are chilling and slimy, just the adjectives that Plath would likely use to describe these people. In the end, when each person “sucks her last tear and turns away”, they physically remove the grief from the situation and replace it with tabloid greed. They come looking for a “scandal”, and when they are “cheated of the pyre and the rack”, they leave. All they care about is the thrill of a tragedy, and Plath cannot stand it.

Another thing Plath could never stand was the idea of staying idle and mindless as a typical housewife. She paints Medea as such a housewife, and a broken one at that. In Medea’s home, we see familiar objects such as “shoes”, “upholstery”, and “apartments”, but they are now “charred”, “sodden”, and “ruined”, revealing the physical and emotional upset that has occurred. She still “moves humbly”, though, and shows no emotion as to what has just happened. In portrayals of women in the 1950s, we often see them silent and puttering as they go about completing the work that must be done, all while the true action of the piece occurs. Here, Medea is just as silent, with no grief or anger or remorse, and it is just as frightening as the concept of complacency was to Plath.

Sylvia Plath has painted a fearful picture of suburban scandal in the 1950s. The neighbors are nosy, the perpetrator is blissfully unaware, and yet the story is much more familiar. In fact, the story has existed for thousands of years. Still, the only way to make the present resonate with both itself and with the future is sometimes to correlate it with the past. By using elements of Greek mythology to highlight problems with society, Plath created a poem that transcends time to tell a heart-wrenching story.