Who Fears the Murderous Mother? Medea and Prokne between Greek Tragedy and Visual Culture

This paper traces how Greek myth casts the mother who kills her own child as a figure of power and disturbance. Focusing on Medea and Prokne, it examines how the murderous mother turns motherhood into a charged site where female identity, bodily violence, and social order are brought into tension. Both figures turn the child’s body into a weapon against the husband, yet this act exceeds domestic revenge: the child embodies patrilineal descent, marital alliance, the future of the oikos, and the fragile boundary between maternal care and destructive agency. Combining close reading with iconographic analysis, the discussion compares Euripides’ Medea, Sophocles’ Tereus, and related visual traditions. It considers how tragic rewriting sharpened the fear attached to these women, and how visual culture absorbed, displaced, or transformed that fear. Medea appears as a foreign, eloquent, and intelligent woman whose revenge exposes anxieties about female speech and the outsider’s intrusion into the household. Prokne, torn between natal and marital kinship, forces the roles of mother, wife, daughter, and sister into violent contradiction. Rather than a monster, the murderous mother functions as a mythic pressure point through which Greek culture imagined the collapse of kinship, gender hierarchy, and domestic continuity.