SOURCE: Greenberg, Mitchell. “Mythifying Matrix: Corneille's Médée and the Birth of Tragedy.” In Corneille, Classicism and the Ruses of Symmetry, pp. 16-36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Greenberg offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Médée.

‘… que peut faire une femme?’

Corneille enters the tragic universe through the door of myth. By choosing to stage, as his first tragedy, Medea's infanticide, Corneille both affirms a belief in (literary) genealogy, of his own place in progression (Euripides, Seneca, Corneille), and plunges back into a universe that pre-exists history. C. Lévi-Strauss has taught us that one of the essential attributes of myth is its ‘eternal’ quality, a quality which negates ‘time’ and ignores ‘progress’:

Un mythe se rapporte toujours à des événements passés: ‘avant la création du monde’, ou pendant les premiers âges, en tout cas, ‘il y a longtemps...