On Medea’s Character
Euripides’ Medea is a text that supersedes its time. It is intensely psychological in a Shakespearean sense and despite all appearances it is very multidimensional. The premise of the play itself is very simple, as it relates to the audience the story of a married woman who was cheated on by her husband and then tells of her ensuing quest for retribution. The way this woman by the name Medea seeks to do this, however, is something of magnanimous importance. It is through the execution of her subsequent plans that we can best understand the real nature of her character.
To start off, let us analyze in closer detail what occurred with the couple. The nurse’s opening monologue may suffice in accomplishing this. There are some lines where she talks of Medea and her husband Jason:
“And she herself helped Jason in every way.
This is indeed the greatest salvation of all--
For the wife not to stand apart from the husband.
But now there’s hatred everywhere, Love is diseased.
For, deserting his own children and my mistress,
Jason has taken a royal wife to bed,
The daughter of the ruler of this land, Creon.
And poor Medea is slighted, and cries aloud…” (Euripides 1)
Those few lines tell the audience an incredible amount of information that will lead to understanding the root and nature of Medea’s subsequent actions. First of all, notice that by claiming the husband/wife union is of utmost sanctity, there is an implication that its violation is the greatest sin (please pardon the religious lexicon here). Love seems to be deified here as well, made an entity that is now “diseased.” Furthermore, notice the first claim, that Medea helped Jason “in every way.” What is its importance? It is important because traitors generally betray someone who helped them in some way or other, but “every way” is used here alongside the importance given to marriage with the possible aim of emphasizing how extreme Jason’s treason was. It is made even more poignant by making note of the fact that he abandoned his own children as well. So this early in the play we already have an enemy, someone to despise. Obviously that is Jason.
So now Euripides has forced the audience to root for Medea, a woman left alone deserted with her children by a husband that committed a heinous crime. However, the audience is quickly made uncomfortable with Medea soon after she appears beginning due to a set of macabre lines directed at her own children :
“Ah, I have suffered
What should be wept for bitterly. I hate you,
Children of a hateful mother. I curse you
And your father. Let the whole house crash.” (5)
Now the audience has one of three courses to take in following the rest of the play: either they side with this woman and deem her point valid, they oppose her now and thus make Jason the “good one,” or they side with her and pity that she may have lost her mind. This poses a dilemma, for now all her subsequent actions and ideas shall be seen either in a positive, negative, or neurotic light. The challenge is deciding which of those three. Euripides, as a talented playwright, does not make this an obvious decision.
But perhaps those few words coming from Medea’s mouth are not enough to make a decision. Maybe we need to see what she is going to put into action in order to decide if she is right, wrong, or crazy. So what does she decide to do? The following words are chilling:
“And now I shall tell to you the whole of my plan.
Listen to these words that are not spoken idly.
I shall send one of my servants to find Jason
And request him to come once more into my sight.
And when he comes, the words I’ll say will be soft ones.
I’ll say that I agree with him, that I approve
The royal wedding he has made, betraying me.
I’ll say it was profitable, an excellent idea.
But I shall beg that my children remain here:
Not that I would leave in a country that hates me
Children of mine to feel their enemies’ insults,
But that by a trick I may kill the king’s daughter.” (Euripides 25)
As if those words are not terrible enough, she goes back to the comments she made earlier about her children and includes their death as part of the plan as well. In fact, it is an essential part of it. At this point it would seem obvious that the woman is clearly out of her mind. But Euripides is too crafty for making a simple play with even simpler characters.
The fact that she decided to kill her children did not make it a simple decision for the audience to judge her scruples, but rather, it turns everything into a quagmire. There is no denying that this claim that may sound absurd and dangerous, but you need only listen to her defense of the decision to admit it was not blind fury or thoughtless revenge:
“Women, my task is fixed: as quickly as I may
To kill my children, and start away from this land,
And not, by wasting time, to suffer my children
To be slain by another hand less kindly to them.
Force every way will have it they must die, and since
This must be so, then I, their mother, shall kill them.” (40)
Euripides has clearly made this play one where the emotions of the audience are in some sort of rollercoaster, and this is a prime example. For how can someone be so motherly and yet so vicious and seemingly heartless? The manner in which she responds to Jason’s iniquity with regards to the children, though, however confusing, lets the audience finally uncover her character. This is especially the case after she does the deed-- not only after planning it, which may in fact be enough.
So what does the audience uncover about her character? Well, for one, it definitely considers her a frustrating person. Why? Because it wanted her to triumph yet at the same time it did not want her plans to be executed perfectly, as they unfortunately did. The audience can also consider her paradoxical. Throughout the play she seems like a deep-thinking character, but did it ever cross her mind that she could have taken her children with her to Athens? And it is not unreasonable to say that she is also Hegelian in the evil sense, because it seems as if her decision to kill the children instead of Jason himself was made to make him suffer (on page 46 she claims she killed them “To make you [Jason] feel pain”). So in the end what is left is a character full of internal contradictions, one needing proper guidance yet nonetheless sane enough in knowing what she was doing. The audience itself, as shown, experiences these internal contradictions in deciding to side with her or not, and thus Euripides gives everyone a taste of what it is like to be in a serious dilemma and how difficult it is to judge what is right and wrong. Here the spectators and the character share a bond.
Work Cited
Euripides. Medea. Trans. Rex Warner. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.
