In Defense of Medea

Warning! Below is my half-satirical/half-real take on Medea as a sympathetic heroine.

In World Literature class this spring, we read the ancient Greek play Medea by Euripides (translated by Diane Arnson Svarlien). When the play starts, Medea has already killed her brother and a king. In the play, she goes on to kill her husband Jason’s new wife and father-in-law, as well as her own children. Yet from the first page, I fell in love with this scandalous icon. 

One of the first things she says onstage is:

“Aaaaah!

May a firebolt from heaven come shoot through my skull!

What do I gain by being alive?

Oh, god. How I long for the comfort of death.

I hate this life. How I wish I could leave it.”

And who hasn’t felt this way? Who has not felt this anger at life, this angst, this despair? 

Everything that Medea does, she does after Aphrodite, the goddess of love, put a spell on her to make her fall in love with Jason. She is not in control. And what teenager doesn’t know that feeling? 

She Did It All for Jason

Medea is a princess and a sorceress from Colchis, what is now Georgia, considered a “barbarian” land by ancient Greeks. 

When the play begins, her husband Jason has just left her and their two young sons to marry the local princess. He claims this will better their lives.

Medea suffers deeply from this betrayal. Aphrodite has doomed her to love Jason; and he has broken their marriage oaths, used, and then discarded her. All this after she killed people to get him his throne, was exiled from her homeland, and had two children with him. (Yes, she kills a bit. But she is strong and magical. Her powers are as if from a fairy tale, but not a Disney one.) 

King Creon, Jason’s new father-in-law, tells Medea that she and her sons must leave the country and go into exile. She convinces him to let her stay for just one day by appealing to him as a parent. “You yourself have children,” she tells the king, “If we go into exile, I’m not worried about myself—I weep for [her sons’] disaster.” And with this clever manipulation of the King’s feelings, she gains one more day to put her plans in motion. 

I like how she presses the right buttons to get what she needs. She’s calculating and sharp and gets what she wants: revenge on Jason.

On top of feeling for her rage and powerlessness, I also relate to Medea as a refugee.

She sends poisoned robes to Jason’s new wife, killing her and her father Creon. 

Then she kills her children, which is where she loses a lot of readers.

Medea’s reason for killing her kids is, first and foremost, to hurt Jason. However, inside her a battle rages. She does not want to kill them. She tries to talk herself out of it: “I will take my children with me when I leave. Why should I, just to cause their father pain, feel twice the pain myself by harming them?” 

When she decides to go through with it, it is in part to save them. She fears they could be tortured in retaliation for her murders. “No, I will not leave my children at the mercy of my enemies’ outrage.” Her mixed and contradictory motives show how complex people are. Some tend to think in just black and white, but really we’re all gray. (Including me: I am personally horrified when somebody kills a person, while I also cheer on Medea for being so strong and feel compassion for her suffering and for not being in control of her fate.)  

Medea was bewitched by Aphrodite to love Jason. When he leaves her, that love transforms into anger. A lot of teens do not feel in control of their emotions or their lives. I relate because there are so many things I wish I could do to make my life better, but it is all controlled by either adults or the laws of the universe. There is always something I have no power over: a bunch of assignments due on the same day; the fact that nothing in life lasts; or a war driving me into exile from my home.

Someone says about Medea as the play opens, “A fatherland is no small thing to lose.” I had to leave Ukraine three years ago, and I too long for my home. On top of feeling for her rage and powerlessness, I also relate to Medea as a refugee.

Her Lone Defender

The first day my class discussed the play, I was giddy because I love Greek mythology and just from the first 10 pages, I already liked Medea. I said to my friend before class began, “They are going to misunderstand and judge her.” I was right. My classmates were quick to deem Medea wicked and horrible, while I saw a hurt person who was also smart and powerful. 

A girl in my class said she disliked Medea because she seems crazy, in reference to Medea’s quote above about “longing for the comfort of death” via a “firebolt from heaven” shooting through her skull. The same speech that made me like her! 

This same girl also objected to Medea’s raging, “O children, accursed, may you die–with your father! Your mother is hateful. Go to hell, the whole household.”  

I raised my hand and defended that last speech. “She is obviously hurting,” I said, Medea’s lone defender in the class. “Of course she is going to be depressed and say brash things. Has nobody ever felt anger and said something that they shouldn’t have?”

I also wondered if my classmates could relate to her need for respect. Medea’s insistence that Jason not just get away with betraying his oath to her and starting a new family makes sense to me. 

One of the reasons I love Greek mythology is that it captures the unfairness of life. Gods and goddesses are petty and random and use humans as pawns in their struggles, not unlike dictators in real life. Medea is a murderer, but she’s also an exiled refugee, someone who’s been cast aside by her beloved, and most important, fated to do what she does. The play ends with these lines from the Chorus:

“The gods can accomplish what no one would hope for.

What we expect may not happen at all,

while the gods find a way, against all expectation,

to do what they want, however surprising.

And that is exactly how this case turned out.”