Reading Euripides’ Medea, and nearing the end, I’ve come to the point where her revenge is complete, and she’s having her final words with Jason.
One line runs something like “you didn’t expect, having scorned my bed” or, perhaps more accurately, something like “you were not about to…” [εμελλες] (1354) and then the next line: “to live your life through pleasurably, laughing at me.” (1355, of course)
It seems to me as if these two lines perfectly encapsulate the two sides of her emotion. In 1354 is all her spite. There is no way, she says, that you were going to get away with this, and calls the injury by name (also interesting that at this pivotal moment, the injury she names is not the breaking of oaths, but the sexual insult). In the next line, she describes quickly and vividly the life that he meant to lead, and both her brevity and her inclusions (pleasure, laughter) are more than adequate for anyone who’s ever felt resentful. That line, its irony, is pure hate.
And it’s not hate of the time that makes Medea fearful, I don’t think. Here more than anywhere, even though she’s just killed her children, she is sympathetic. In her last burst of rage, where her choice of words is no longer calculated, but expresses everything that boiled in her mind until her vengeance broke forth, she is finally human. She is more human here, when she admits that her deepest motivation the whole time was Jason’s sexual infidelity, was jealousy, and just jealousy, than she was even when she wavered in her plan to kill her children.
Maybe she’s not supposed to be quite this sympathetic to the spectator, but this is how I’m reading her. I would love to play Medea. I’m not an actress, but I think, in this scene at least, I get her.
