Medea from Greek Mythology
What is the most heinous crime a human being can commit? I think most would agree it’s filicide; the murder of one’s own children.
The act is perceived as particularly appalling when it’s at the hands of a child’s mother. Mothers are meant to be nurturers and caregivers, not to mention the incubators that grow babies inside of them for an extended period of time before giving birth. Mothers literally give people life, and humanity’s collective hang-ups regarding this supposed biological imperative is like, a whole thing.
With that societal/cultural/historical context in mind, it’s no wonder that Medea cannot escape the notoriety of killing her two sons. Even in adaptations of her story that end well before the crime is committed, the fact that she will eventually take the lives of her own children overshadows everything else in her life. Just as Oedipus is the guy who married his mother, Medea is the woman who killed her sons.
The thing about Greek mythology is that a fair number of the stories seek to embody an idea; a concept; a taboo. The aforementioned Oedipus brought forth the theory of the Oedipal Complex, in which little boys secretly want to get rid of their fathers in order to have their mothers all to themselves, just as Electra is the gender inverse of this; girls who imagine themselves in competition with their mothers for their father’s attention.
Within that psychological framework, the figure of Medea might simply represent a dark subconscious desire in mothers to rid themselves of their children, or at least the potential for it. Perhaps there are shades of post-natal depression to be found here, long before people had a term for it.
But within the story of Medea itself, there’s… well, a story to go with it. The reason given for the filicide is that it’s an act of vengeance against her husband Jason when he decides to put her aside in order to marry a younger woman; a match that will grant him political and social advantages. Unable to accept this, Medea kills their two sons to punish him for his betrayal. The ultimate woman scorned.
I’ve no doubt there’s a well-meaning novel out there in the current deluge of Greek mythology retellings that seeks to justify or at least recontextualize these murders. Perhaps Medea went temporarily mad, like Grace in The Others. Perhaps she was driven to desperation like Anna Karenina on realizing she had no home, status or protection without Jason, and that her children would suffer terribly as a result.
Perhaps she felt she had lost everything and so might as well finish the job, or that having sacrificed so much for her husband (including committing terrible acts for his sake, like desecrating her brother’s body) her pride would not allow her to simply give up and let him abandon her without a fight. Heck, maybe as a witch of Colchis, she had a profoundly different outlook on the nature of death and who has the right to deal it out.
Even Euripides’s play on the subject is not without a degree of sympathy for Medea’s plight, stating: “Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive.”
Personally, I don’t buy any of these explanations. The whole point of the story is that Medea does a heinous thing, an unthinkable thing. It’s no use trying to alleviate or rationalize it, for the very crux of Medea’s story is that a mother killed her children – deliberately and with much consideration. Hate overcame love, as she makes clear in Euripides: “I have done it because I loathed you [Jason] more than I loved them.”
Her hate for Jason was stronger than her love for her children. What must that feel like? But what should she have done instead? Admit defeat, bow out quietly, and lose her children to their father? For almost every single mother in the world, the answer would be an incontrovertible yes, that they should indeed swallow their pride and passively accept defeat for the sake of their children.
But not Medea.
The unsettling thing about her is that her logic is sound, and her motivation understandable. Jason threw away her life, and so she had to repay him in kind. The great love she had for him was poisoned in the wake of his betrayal. She had given up so much for him, and was now on the brink of losing everything – including her sons, one way or the other. “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”
And so she does an evil thing, one that can never be defended, for if she despises Jason’s cruel treatment of her, then how can she justify all the innocent people she destroys to obtain her revenge? There’s an ongoing recent trend in fiction to try and soften female characters instead of letting them be cruel and complex, full of rage and hate; perhaps bourn out of people overidentifying with certain characters and so trying to mitigate their actions as a form of self-defense.
But we should be afraid of the dark places in ourselves and what we’re capable of – characters like Medea are what bring them out into the light so that we might examine them at a safe distance. She’s a wronged woman, and a proactive participant in her story, and a human being with all her faculties – and she’s a villain. She says so herself: “I understand too well the dreadful act I'm going to commit, but my judgement can't check my anger, and that incites the greatest evils human beings do.” The most we can do for Medea is let her own the terrible crime that she commits.
(Clytemnestra on the other hand – she did nothing wrong!)
