Medea
A woman betrayed by her husband destroys what he values most. The literature on maternal destructiveness begins here.
Medea has already betrayed her father and homeland to help Jason win the golden fleece and carry him to power. The play opens in Corinth after he has set her aside to marry the king's daughter, leaving her stateless and facing exile with their two young sons. From that humiliation she moves, with frightening composure, to a plan: she feigns acceptance, secures herself a refuge, and turns her considerable intelligence against everyone who once depended on it.
What the play offers a clinician is the mother and the destroyer held in one figure, never split apart for comfort. Euripides gives Medea long passages of deliberation in which love for the children and the wish to devastate their father contend without either winning cleanly. Her tenderness toward them is real; so is the calculation that overrides it. The disturbance is in how continuous it all feels, attachment and annihilating rage travelling the same channel, directed at the same small faces.
About the author
Euripides
Euripides (c. 480 to 406 BCE) was a Greek tragedian, the youngest of Athens's three major writers of tragedy, after Aeschylus and Sophocles. His surviving plays, among them Medea and The Bacchae, are noted for their close attention to the inner lives of their characters, particularly women pushed to extremity by desire, grief, or revenge. He gave unusual weight to the irrational, to impulse and self-deception, and to the private suffering behind public events.
Details
- Greek