who was cruel enough to kill your trusting brother, then leave with me aboard the noble Argo. That’s how it started. Then we married. Then you bore me children. The ones you killed! All of this because of jealousy. Barbarians act like this, not Greeks. Yet I married a barbarian and yoked myself to hate and destruction. (lines 1297-1298, 1305-1318) For Jason, Medea’s murder of her sons is consistent with the murder of her brother. The former action is evidence of her “badness” that explains her recent wrongdoing. He characterizes her as “already a dangerous betrayer of family and country.” Notably, however, Jason also qualifies her disposition in ways that are unacceptable to Character Theory. He associates her behavior with her “barbarian” (or non-Greek) origins, characterizing her in terms of generalizations attributed to foreigners. Of course, Jason is responding from a place of devastation, and his anger and denigration of his wife is understandable in that way. But Medea’s own earlier recounting of her past actions do not necessarily endear her to audiences even before she kills her sons. Speaking to the chorus and, later, to Jason about her past treason and fratricide, the regret she shows is qualified in self-incriminating ways. She tells the chorus, Before I betrayed my father, before I butchered my brother at home then dropped him from the Argo, piece by piece, like bait, I made Jason swear to love and honor me, for after my shameful treason, I thought only great oaths would keep him bound to me. (lines 159-166) Medea’s treason is not personally shameful to her. She is not ashamed of it, but shamed by it in the eyes of Colchians and, she fears, others – potentially even Jason. Hence, she demands oaths that bind him to her, given that she is exiled from her home and is dependent on him. Later, she reminds Jason that she “abandoned her country” and “engineered the murder” of King Pelias, causing “grief and death” in the process. (Pelias’ murder was orchestrated by Medea in a failed bid to have Jason assume to the throne of his home country, Iolcus; their involvement in which was the pretext for their banishment to Corinth.) “All this I did for you! / And in return you honored me / with contempt, betrayal, a replacement wife” (lines 489-491). In Medea’s thinking, her past actions were wrong only insofar as they left her vulnerable and were then 34
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