Medea Character Analysis

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Medea and Infanticide: Analyzing Reasons her motives from Altruism to Spousal Revenge. Determined, calculating and remorseless, Andrea Yates committed a filicidal crime that left the world in confusion, fear and disgust. Heeding only Satan’s call, defying her motherly instincts and ignoring their frantic apologizes, she drowned her five children in the bathtub. The eldest, Noah, seven years old, had to witness his mother take the life of his siblings ruthlessly and return their corpses back in their beds before she came for him (Hyman, 2004, p. 194). Infanticide is not a novel issue; in fact, tales and incidents of infanticide run way back in history and myths like the stories of Medea and Malinche, famous women from the Greek mythologies and…show more content…
When King Creon ordered her exile, her brain suddenly pictured the burden of raising her boys and fetching for their needs. In the play she expresses those fears more than once; for example, in the quote mentioned in the epitaph, she pleads with Creon saying that she cannot even offer them water, the most basic need. Even though one might argue that she was using the children as a method of manipulation to stay in Corinth till the night, it is evident that she has had the thought lingering on her mind. Because she was not thinking of killing her sons at that time, Medea’s words, though manipulative as they may seem afterwards in the play, were sincere expressions of her fears towards her boys’ threatened future. As a result, and like a cat, Medea killed her boys due to her inability to provide for…show more content…
West defines maternal acutely psychotic infanticide as the crime occurring when the mother is mentally unstable or suffering from a strong Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD (West, 2015, Para.11). Psychology journals define PTSD as “… an emotional condition that sometimes follows a traumatic event, particularly an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious bodily injury to oneself or others and that creates intense feelings of fear, helplessness, or horror” (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014, Para.1). Women who suffer from PTSD are usually those abandoned, raped or abused by their spouses. In most of the cases they are reminded of these traumatic experiences when they look at the children, the common link which they share with their partners. In Medea’s situation, Jason’s betrayal, her banishment sentence and the Greek society’s treatment of her were the reasons that caused her to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress
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