Medea and Her Humanity
Though it has been argued that in Euripides’ play, Medea, the title character progresses from distraught and slighted wife to inhuman Fury, the slayer of her own sons, she never truly loses her humanity. The life Euripides has given her to live is one of great passion, betrayal, disappointment and tragedy, and while we may never see her happy or in a state of emotional equilibrium, we do see her reacting to that life of myth in an undeniably human fashion. In everything she does, from her private outbursts and her dealings with the kings of Corinth and Athens to the very murders she commits, Medea asserts her humanity. If we are revolted by the murders that Medea performs in her rage and desire for revenge, it is not because those acts are inhuman. They are all utterly human: we are repulsed because we imagine ourselves doing those same things.
The play begins in the midst of domestic unrest. Jason, whom Medea has given up her family and her homeland to aid and to marry, has informed her that under the laws of his land, Corinth, they were never actually married, the presence of their two children notwithstanding. The first we hear from Medea is her offstage lamenting:
Oh,
how unhappy I am, how wretched my sufferings—
Oh, woe is me, I wish I could die! (Euripides, Medea, li. 95.)
She then extends her death wish to include her children, the “accursed children/ of a hateful mother,” and their father, Jason (li. 111-113).
Suicidal and regretful, she berates herself endlessly for having left her native land. Her situation is extremely
pathetic; she is alone in the world with nothing to help or cheer her. The emotions that Euripides arouses in the reader are first sympathy, and then fear. We fear for Medea, since she is alone and abandoned, and we fear for those around her, since we do not know yet what she will do in her grief.
Medea’s first words after her entrance are eloquent, intelligent and emotional, showing a deeply injured heart. She addresses the women of Corinth, eliciting their sympathy:
...In my case, this thing which has struck me so unexpectedly, has broken my heart. I am lost, I have forfeited all joy in living, my friends, and I want to die. For well I know that the man who was my everything has proved the vilest of all—my husband. (Medea, Li. 225-229)
She goes on to bemoan the plight of women, who must take a “master” for their bodies and suffer bad husbands all too often, and to underline her forlorn isolation in Corinth, a land in which she is a low class citizen since she is a woman and also a foreigner. (li. 233-60) The chorus of Corinthian women agrees that Medea is justified in her tumultuous
flood of emotion, and in her
thirst for revenge. Her grand talk has in no way overstepped the bounds of any normal emotional reaction to her extreme situation. Are there more human concerns than these of love, freedom, and
loneliness?
From the first few pages of the drama, it is clear that Medea is a woman of great passion, but to what use will she put that fervor? It is convincing that at this point she does not know the answer herself. This is perhaps the closest she comes to appearing fragile, since she continues to gain intensity and strength as her plans develop. At this point, we see that she is driven by entirely human emotions. She is without hope, yearning to die, obviously so upset by her husband’s rejection of her unrestrained love that her heart is fit to break. Here is no shimmering goddess of sadistic revenge. Here is, instead, a wounded woman who has had her greatest trust betrayed.
Medea’s meeting with Creon, king of Corinth, shows her to be distraught but also in possession of her wits. Her way of gaining extra time in which to carry out her plot is extremely logical. When Creon enters the scene, he declares that he is afraid of what she may do to his daughter, Glauce—Jason’s new bride. To ensure the new couple’s safety, Medea is to leave Corinth at once, in exile:
I am afraid of you—I musn’t beat around the bush—afraid that you may do my child an incurable hurt. …I hear that you are threatening—so they tell me—to take some action against the husband and his bride and me, who gave my daughter to him. …It is better, woman, that I should be hated by you now than weaken and repent too late. (Creon, Li. 283-291)
By taking this very precaution, however, Creon gives Medea the information she needs to convince him to be more lenient with her: he makes it clear that his family is everything to him, and that he will do anything in his power to protect them, even saying later, “
I love my family rather more than
I love you.” (Li. 327) In weighing out loud the cost of his actions—that Medea should hate him—he also shows his unwillingness to be viewed as a
tyrannical man. Medea makes use of these two facts in her ensuing entreaty. She immediately begs him to let her stay for one day before she begins her
exile, so that she will be able to secure a
haven for her children:
…Pity them. You too are a father, you have children. You are likely to be sympathetic to mine. …I weep for them, the victims of ill fortune. (Medea, Li. 340)
She calls upon his reason and his pity, so eloquently that he can not bring himself to refuse, for to do so would—he thinks—cause him to appear
despotic. While saying himself that he may be making a mistake, Creon, believing that he is dealing with a woman and therefore someone who is driven solely by emotional responses, is swayed by her pathetic situation, his own desire to be looked upon as a
benevolent sovereign, and his love for his family. It is through her ability to quickly change and form her arguments that Medea secures the time she will need to carry out her revenge.
Medea has a similar conversation with Aegeus, king of Athens. On his way home from a counsel with Apollo’s oracle at Delphi regarding his own unfortunate lack of progeny, he passes Medea. She pounces on this opportunity, explaining her wretched situation and then securing his word that he will give her asylum in Athens once she has left Corinth in exile.
Jason wrongs me though I did him no wrong. …He has a woman who supplants me as mistress of his house…and we, his former friends, are now dishonored. …Pity me…as I go into desolate exile and receive me in your country at the hearth of your palace. …I shall put an end to your childlessness—through me you will beget children. (Medea, Li. 692, 710-719)
Note the deliberate way in which Medea sets up a sympathetic kinship between herself and Aegeus, pronouncing them both “dishonored” by Jason’s betrayal. She then plays on his dear wish for children of his own by promising to be his
fertile mate, should she come to Athens.
Yet again, Medea shows herself fully in control of her rational faculties. She is persistent about obtaining this safe haven because she knows that terrible things are in her future. She has formed a plan and knows the probable repercussions; Medea is not a stupid woman. Furthermore, she demonstrates her understanding of the importance of children, which becomes paramount later in the drama. What she displays most here is her dedication to the cause of avenging herself. Is this not a human emotion? If she were becoming a blind Fury, would she bother with this? If she were losing her humanity, what would be the motivation for this preparation? I see none. Rather, she is continuing to work out of the human need to survive, and the notion that though the heart shatters with treachery and wants to stop, one must go on living as well as one can.
So far I have dealt only with Medea’s grip on reality and her ability to think logically and thoroughly, but of course there is more than that to a person’s humanity. The monologue that Medea delivers after having sent her poisoned gifts to the palace is very powerful and perhaps the most emotional speech in the play. This tortured conversation that Medea has with her self about the fate of her children shows that, even at this late stage in the play and in her lethal plans, she is still without question a tormented mother, full of human love and conflicting emotion:
O children…you have a city and a home. You can leave me, your mother, in my misery and pass your whole lives far away from me. …O, what misery my willfulness is bringing me! …Alas! …Why do you smile this final smile of all? Aiai, what can I do? My heart’s steel shattered, women, when I saw my children’s bright eyes. I could never do the deed. Goodbye to my former plans. …Do I make myself ridiculous by letting my enemies go unpunished? I must face the deed. Shame on my cowardice....
…Ah, do not, my heart, do not do this. Let them be, poor heart—spare the children. Alive with us in Athens, they will make you happy. By the avenging fiends below in Hades, it will never come to pass that I leave my children for my enemies to insult. There’s no alternative—they must die. (Medea, Li. 1020-1060)
In this, the most difficult passage of the play,
Euripides forces us to come face to face with one of the most horrifying thoughts possible: a mother debating the
murder of her children. Her profound love is never in question. She is, rather, deciding what the future could possibly hold for her sons, whether they should live or die. What life could they enjoy as
second-class sons in Creon’s
palace, the bastard children of
Jason? How could she bear to bring upon them a life of exile, and more of the rootlessness that she has so painfully endured? Medea must also weigh carefully, desperately, the value of her son’s lives, asking herself if they more or less valuable to her than the pain that Jason will feel upon the event of their deaths. Medea beseeches the world, the air, to answer her miserable question: can there be a rage so strong that it overrides the strongest and most natural love, that love of a mother for her children?
What can Euripides have meant by drawing a heroine so sympathetic and simultaneously horrible? He knew as well as we that humanity is not an easy thing to define. In Medea, he pushed the boundaries of human behavior so far that we question the very being, the humanity, of the heroine; we question whether we can allow her, in our minds, to keep her soul. We are so eager to deny her human status because we fear the possibility of unrestrained emotion, the potential for which lies in all of us. The violence that Euripides unleashes through Medea is at the core of every human soul. With our reason, that same consciousness that places us above mere animals, comes a danger and a complexity. Medea’s uninhibited actions stand as symbols for the pride, passion, and conflict that lie latent in every man and woman.