Ann Morgan’s TED Talk, ‘My year reading a book from every country in the world’, inspired me. My friend and I decided to undertake a similar project- reading a book from every country in the world- but without setting a time limit on it like Morgan did. We decided to start in Greece, with a Greek tragedy called ‘The Murderess’ by Alexandros Papadiamantis.
I have read one Greek tragedy before, except this was a play. It was the famous ‘Medea’ by Euripides, and I noticed that many of the same themes ran between Euripides’ work and Papadiamantis’. The most poignant of these parallels would be the protagonist and central plot revolving around a woman in insanity, committing murder and crime. Whilst Medea and the protagonist of this prose, Hadoula, are similar in this sense, their motives are very much different. Where Medea murdered her children to cause ultimate pain to her prior husband Jason, Hadoula murdered many unrelated children to save their parents and the world of the pain that a female may cause.
It is apparent therefore, that the time period being spoken of is one before the waves of feminism. The Murderess is centred around a patriarchal society- one in which dowries still played a large role. Having said this, I was shocked upon research to find that these dowries still exist in Greece even today! Although it was cancelled legally in the 80’s, it remains a Greek tradition. This is where a bride, or the bride’s family, delivers property or money to her husband upon marriage. This is what seemed to fuel the majority of Hadoula’s rage in The Murderess. Having a female baby was both a disappointment and a stress on a family, for in the future they would then need to pay the dowry for her marriage. Hadoula was tired of being a slave, as Papadiamantis claimed, to her husband, her children, and then her children’s children too. It was this realisation that led to her first murder; the strangulation of her ill baby granddaughter.
Hadoula did experience guilt, it seemed, following the initial murder. She felt a responsibility to tell her family of her sin (although she never did) and begged forgiveness from God. This, however, begun to act as a justification of her sins. Religion perhaps became a method for the protagonist to justify the avoidance of retribution. Each time she committed murder, she would claim she was aiding the family of the girl by taking her from them, and then would almost counteract the sin by supporting the family through their grievances.
Something I found most interesting about The Murderess was the escalation of Hadoula’s crime. Later in the novella, the reader discovers that many years ago, Hadoula helped a woman abort her baby. Therefore, even before the peak of her crimes, she was aiding the end of a female life. Her actions then escalate to the murder of her baby granddaughter- who has actually entered the world this time- which almost acts as the stepping stone to her future, more frequent and brutal, murders. Even when running from the police, Hadoula continues her crimes- often dancing around their nearby presence- which emphasises her level of insanity and belief in what she was doing. Even the prospect of being caught was not enough to deter her.
The novella is particularly short, yet I feel if it was any longer would lose its touch. I think the shortness of the book reflects the impulsive nature of Hadoula after her early realisation, and the ever-quickening pace of the chapters mirroring this descent. Whilst I found it initially slow, and details being too much retold and emphasised, it became much more gripping with patience.
And that concludes the first country ticked off of my list: The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis: dark, shocking, and as the genre suggests; tragic.
ElliePaigeAndre 