Character is an insufficient basis to determine the severity of punishment because it tends to conflate the cause of wrongdoing with the defendant’s “settled” moral disposition. When we un-derstand wrongdoing solely as a function of character, we fail to take mitigating factors such as circumstance into account. The “badness” of a character may even prompt us to actively preclude circumstances from consideration as bad people are no more worthy of understanding than they are sympathy. We see this in an observation Sourvinou-Inwood makes with regard to Euripides’ play. When Medea (or the Nurse) describes her past, it is to provide context necessary to bring the desperation of her current circumstances into sharper relief. That is, she is a woman in exile, betrayed by her husband, with no home or family to which she can return. However, as Sourvinou-Inwood suggests, the direness of Medea’s situation is lost on audiences: “[I]n the world of the play, [her account] attracts the chorus’ sympathy … but in the world of the audience, it evokes the acts committed by Medea that characterize her as a ‘bad woman’ (258). In other words, the audience refuses to see Medea’s terrible circumstance as anything other than deserved given the character evidenced by her past actions – this is before she kills Creon, Glauke, and her own sons. After her murderous spree, the audience is even less likely to consider her circumstances as playing a determining role because, to them, the causal relationship between bad character and wrongdoing is confirmed. This circular logic (which the audience has in common with Character Theory) means that Medea’s escape can only be understood as an unmitigated injustice. Given the limitations character imposes on our ability to gauge (to borrow Fletcher’s term) a person’s just desert, it makes sense to set it aside as the cause of Medea’s actions and to pay closer attention to the role her circumstances played. This is not to argue that Medea’s punishment should not also be determined relative to the horrific crime she has committed but rather to show what details essential to the determination of just desert are lost when relying solely on character. . . . Medea is clearly terrified of betrayal. Her marriage to Jason was fortified (she thought) by the great “binding” oaths she made him take. In the wake of her husband’s disloyalty, negotiating her move to Athens with Aegeus, she refuses to his word and makes him swear an oath to protect her (lines 729-730). Her insistence on oaths is telling. She is keenly aware of her own vulnerability. Exiled from her own country, Colchis, she is dependent on the protection of those willing to take her in. Jason’s betrayal of his oaths and his marriage to Glauke is not just a matter of heartbreak. Contrary to what George Gellie writes, it is wrong to consider Medea’s marriage trouble in the same light as any other modern suburban break-up (16). 36
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