In the tragedy Medea, written by Euripides, Medea creates a plan to kill her children in order to punish her husband for leaving her. However, when she begins to enact her plan she doubts if it is the right decision. Medea’s central conflict of her moral choices is represented in this passage:
“See, my strength
and resolve vanish in the children’s
lively faces. It can’t be done.
Farewell to my schemes. When I leave, I’ll take
my sons with me. Why should I make them
suffer to revenge their father and make
my own suffering so much worse? No, farewell.
And yet what will change? My foes
unpunished mock me.
Should I endure it? The pledges I’ve made
my heart have weakened me.” (Euripides 1019-1028)
This passage demonstrates Medea’s inner conflict between her desire for revenge and her moral obligations. At the beginning of the play, she shows no mercy towards her children. She is consumed by her rage and rejects the sight of her sons. She is committed to her plan to kill her children and she pays no attention to the chorus’s pleas to spare them. However, Medea’s confidence begins to falter when she is faced with the reality of losing them. She wonders why she has the right to decide if her children should suffer. She acknowledges that she is acting selfish and only concerned with minimizing her own pain.
In this moment of debate the audience sees her value something other than revenge. Her maternal instincts momentarily overpower her need to make Jason suffer. However, as she thinks about her incomplete revenge and her enemies mocking her, she remembers why this drastic measure must be taken. As a mother, it is expected that she is the one who cares for the children. Society believes that her sole purpose is to ensure the well-being of them. Killing them would both establish her power in disregarding the social norms and ruin her husband’s life.
Medea challenges the social norms that women abide by everyday in a drastic way. Women are rarely seen as putting their own needs first. By carrying out this horrifying plan Medea encourages women to take control of their lives and defy societal expectations.
Bibliography
Euripides, Michael Collier, and Georgia Machemer. Medea
. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.