Psychoanalytic Observations on ‘The Medium’ and ‘The Telephone’ by Gian-Carlo Menotti

The Medium, a highly successful recent opera by Menotti, portrays a rich and many-layered pattern of relationship between a man and two women. The overt narrative content of The Medium is the story of Madame Flora a charlatan, her daughter Monica, and Toby, a mute young male gipsy, their assistant and servant. The mute loves the daughter, who returns his love in a hesitant way. He is the object of cruel treatment at the hands of the mother. In the first of two acts Madame Flora conducts a seance for several gullible customers; during this seance Monica impersonates the voices of several dead children for the benefit of the customers who are seeking to reestablish contact with their departed dead. Suddenly, during the seance, the medium becomes panic-stricken when she feels a touch on her neck. In great fear she sends the customers home and accuses Toby of having touched her. In the second act a love scene between Toby and Monica is followed by the mother's unsuccessful attempt to persuade Toby to confess that he touched her. In desperation she drives both the returned customers and Toby from the house. The mother sings a powerful, dramatic solo and then goes into a drunken sleep. Toby steals back into the house in an attempt to see Monica without the mother seeing him, but the mother awakens. When she sees motion behind a curtain where Toby is hiding she shoots and kills the mute. Monica rushes out in horror to call the police and the mother falls over the dead boy still questioning whether he touched her or not. This, in brief, is the bare narrative outline of the story of The Medium.

The play really draws its strength from the implicit richness of interplay between the characters. While openly the boy is in love with the girl and fearful of the mother, there is nevertheless a concealed love relationship of great strength between Toby and Madame Flora. The mother and daughter are rivals, each in her own way in love with the boy.

The central tensions of the play are b