Medea: A Woman Scorned Only an Extraordinary

Medea: A Woman Scorned

Only an extraordinary woman is capable of killing her own children, whether to save them from something worse or not. Euripides confronts ancient Greece with a woman who is exceptionally intelligent. And also angry because her husband has unfairly left her for a younger, more beautiful woman who can help him get ahead and "gain wealth and power" for himself and his sons. She helped him get the Golden Fleece, left her own country and family for his, killed her own brother in order to save him when they were on the ship, and bore him two sons. After all Medea has done for him, Jason reveals himself as weak and rather stupid, really, when he fails to appreciate Medea's sacrifices and the depth of her loyalty and passion for him. Her feelings about his abandonment begin with grief and suicidal thoughts: "That lightening from heaven would split my head open. Oh, what use have I now for life? I would find my release in death and leave hateful existence behind me" (747) and progress to murderous fury and rage. The saying "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" certainly applies to Medea. As the children's nurse describes it, " ... now there's hatred everywhere. Love is diseased" (744).

Because Medea lives in a culture where women have no rights, she cannot fight back openly. Instead, she has to scheme. The nurse describes her nature as full of "wildness," with a "bitter nature," and "proud hearted." Feminists might point out that she is the kind of woman most endangered in a patriarchal society where women are required to be compliant, soft-spoken, and long-suffering. Later on, women like Medea, who can't accept subservient roles, will be confined in mental institutions. The nurse implies that "greatness" has done no good to Medea, a princess and sorceress, who has not learned to be humble or moderate. Medea is disillusioned. She believed her marriage to Jason would be forever. She says, "It was everything to me to think well of one man, and he, my own husband, has turned out wholly vile" (749). She goes on to say that women are the "most unfortunate creatures" because they must pay for a husband and "take for our bodies a master; for not to take one is even worse" (750). She cannot escape from him. When a man gets bored with his wife, he can find amusements outside the home, but not women. She sees and points out all the unfairness. Jason has home and family and a support system in his own country. She has nothing. And she wonders what good is it to be smarter and more clever than other people when "it makes you the object of envy and ill will" (751).

When Medea is ordered to leave the country with her children, she begs to stay long enough to decide where to go and what to do about the children. The king (and father of Jason's new bride) gives in and tells her she may stay one day only. She then decides to kill the king, his daughter, and Jason, a smooth talking villain and coward in her view, by poison. Medea promises to help King Aigeus with his infertility problem if he will allow her to stay in Athens, and he agrees, so she has found a place to go afterwards. She begs Jason to get his new wife to go to her father and plead that the children may stay in Corrinth. She then sends the children with their father to the palace with poisoned "gifts" for the bride. At the same time, she expresses pity for the princess who will die and recognizes that her own children are now doomed because they are (innocently) the instruments of murder.