Monday, October 4, 2010

Medea

The play Medea was full of conniving and vicious, acts and thoughts. I couldn’t believe what great lengths Medea would go to seek revenge on her husband. Her plotting and scheming scared me. At the start of the play I was thinking about how separation and remarriage has been apart of our society for centuries. I find it interesting that this tragedy’s initial conflict is based on a husband leaving his wife, and many of today’s movies, books and plays are based on a similar plot. While reading I thought to myself that the words Medea was speaking seemed awfully familiar to me and then I realized it reminded me of the movie The First Wives Club. Similar to Medea, the women in this movie were left by their husbands for younger women and sought revenge for the pain and humiliation their men had caused. One of the women even used her daughter to find out information about her husband, which seemed comparable to Medea using her children to get on Jason’s good side.

The comparison stopped in my mind as soon as I read that Medea was willing to kill her own children to induce pain on her husband. This idea seemed insane to me. I thought it was interesting to see how Medea was willing to kill her children to get what she wanted whereas Creon was willing to die for his daughter because he was so upset she was killed.

1 comment:

  1. I really like your comment of the abandoning husband being a story that is still told today. I have heard of different types of characters (the old wise man, the liar) be described as being archetypal but I have never thought of stories in that way. I also like the contrast you made between Medea killing her children and Creon willing to die for his daughter.

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