SPOILER ALERT!

Medea: Anything for Revenge.

Medea and Other Plays - John Davie, Euripides, Richard Rutherford

Reading progress update: I've read 138 out of 206 pages.

 

Medea: You will regret what you did to me, Jason!

Jason: I regretted it alright

 

How great can your anger be? To what extent are you ready to hurt those who hurt you? Would you kill your own children to appease a great offense?

Medea is ready to do anything it takes to hurt Jason. She takes his wife, his children, and his happiness.

 

What I find fascinating in this play is that I am still sympathetic to Medea after all she did. It feels wrong to be on her side as much as Jason’s side, but she advances reasons to her actions that makes one wonder if she is right (except of course for killing her children since that is unforgivable). She is clever with words, and she manipulates the others the way she pleases. One is tempted to think that she went through a lot and that she was not thinking right, and even that she was in the verge of insanity. But the truth is she was not. She knew what she was doing, and she carried her plan from A to Z for one reason and one only: Revenge.

So is revenge a valid reason to go to extremes to hurt Jason? She argues that letting these children live would doom them. She believes that nothing was right anymore the moment Jason decided to share the bed of another woman. At some point, she was about to cancel her plan, but she realized it was too late. It’s like if fate was working against her, but she managed to have it her own way at the end. She got what she wanted: Revenge.