was it done, I wasn’t given the time to console myself or build alliances with friends. A brutal man who I once loved has smashed me in the face so hard I wear the face of death. (lines 234-240) It makes sense that, to Medea, Jason’s betrayal and Creon’s decree together amount to a great injustice. Creon punishes her out of a fear based on past actions, but willingly accepts Jason, her co-conspirator, into the fold. Where, she might rightfully ask, is Jason’s due desert? But as a foreign woman in Corinth with the threat of exile looming over her, with no male kin or husband to protect her, she is without “official” recourse. In her angry and desperate state, she is prone to making reckless decisions and feels she must take matters into her own hands to exact “justice.” She destroys Jason’s prospects in the Corinthian court by killing Glauke and Creon, and lays waste to his future bloodline by killing his sons, the result of the marriage he betrayed. None of this analysis should suggest that Medea is blameless or that Jason is responsible for the death of his sons, as she attempts to cast her actions. It aims to show that a more careful engagement with Medea’s circumstances allows us to see her as human rather than a monster, or “Scylla” as Jason calls her. In light of such an analysis, the circular logic of Character Theory no longer holds. Her most recent wrongdoing is not simply more evidence of the bad character inferred from past wrongdoings. She is not only a brother-murderer, sorceress, and barbarian. She is also a betrayed wife, abandoned in exile, scared, in distress, and wronged. Many mitigating details emerge when we suspend character as the lens by which to determine the level of her responsibility, the severity of her wrongdoing, and the desert she is due. A reading of her circumstances makes clear that Medea is punished when Creon exiles her because, based on his judgement of her character, she represents a threat to his daughter. What should be clear is that Medea is not ascribed her “badness” merely on the basis of her earlier actions. If that was the case, Jason, her partner in past crimes, would not have been welcomed into the Corinthian Court. Few of us today would claim that Medea is more predisposed to immoral acts than Jason because she is a woman or because she is foreign. But to Creon, and a Greek audience largely made up of men, Medea’s womanhood and barbarianism are grounds for added suspicion. As Ekow Yankah argues, Character Theory cannot guarantee that implicit biases will be excluded from character judgements. Such biases incorporate reductive stereotypes of race, nationality, and sex in determining character, even though such aspects of a person cannot justifiably be claimed to make them less moral, and therefore more deserving of severe punishment for wrongdoings. How we understand and interpret character is simply too arbitrary to serve as a reliable basis by which to determine punishment. 38
39 Publizr Home