Medea –Zhuoya Li
Medea is a play about love, hate and revenge. Jason wants to remarry another woman named Glauce and abandon his original wife, Medea. Jason hurt Medea to the extent that Medea doubt the meaning of her existence as well as her children. Then she decides to revenge, even though that means the death of her own children. Medea poisoned the coronet and dress given to Glauce, and caused Glauce to die out of poison. Creon, the father of Glauce, embraces Glauce and die with her together.
The play is in a stage. The protagonist, Medea, wears some old scarf to show her difficult life. Her eyes are often with tears and her voice are shaking. She is old, but she can speak very determinately and full of strength. Another thing is that she used to speak with deep breathing. It seems she need to breath a lot to extract energy out of it. Jason, on the other hand, wears an armor to show how brutal and cruel he is. He seldom laughs and mostly with his cold face. One of the rare times that Jason is happy is when he hugs his own children. We can see that he really cares about his children, and therefore give Medea an insight of how to revenge Jason —to deprive the things that Jason values. Medea loves her children deeply as well, as we can see in how she embraces her children and look them in the eye with mother’s love. She is just unwilling to be sacrificed by his husband and lost in this competition with him.
After getting the permission to stay in Athens as sanctuary, Medea excitedly screams the names of those ancient gods. She is overwhelmed with joy as she has cleared all of the obstacles she has for her revenge. She is brutal enough to use her own children in a ploy to kill her enemy— Glauce, and bring his husband the pain. She can endure guilt, however horrible; but she cannot endure the laughter of his enemies.
Her way of justifying her actions does not seem to respect human nature and social norms either. She said that Creon’s family will kill her children regardless of what she does, so it will be better for her to kill them herself. She does not want her children to suffer because of others. For me it is not really a responsible and logical solution. If I were her, I would do my best to protect my children first before considering killing them. She displays an undeniable conviction to her doctrines that do not meet the moral standard. Even though we can call it a heroic action of protecting her dignity and pride, it is too much heroic that it become unconstrained and ferocious. This revenge can be viewed ambivalently, one view is that she is brave and tenacious enough to do what she wants to do, and the other is that she is not willing to sacrifice and endure something at first before starting a battle that no one really wins.