The Madness of Love in Medea

Wan-Ting Lin

Blog Post #1                   

The madness of love

In the play Medea, the madness of love is the most important point. As a sorceress, Medea is a powerful woman who has helped her husband Jason conquer many difficulties. However, as a powerful woman, she can’t accept the consequence of being abandoned by a man whom she loves. Her passion drives her to become an irrational woman who can even kill her children to express her love to Jason. In the introduction of the play, the narrator said that “Medea is consistently shown to be a figure of willful passion, brought into exile through her love for Jason, (p49).” This sentence refers to the consistent love of the mad woman. She is deeply in love with Jason, but at the same time Jason didn't love her anymore.

MEDEA: Women, my task is fixed: as quickly as I may

To kill my children, and start away from this land,

And not, by wasting time, to suffer my children

To be slain by another hand less kindly to them.

Force every way will have it they must die, and since

This must be so, then I, their mother, shall kill them.

Oh, arm yourself in steel, my heart! Do not hang back

From doing this fearful and necessary wrong.

Oh, come, my hand, poor wretched hand, and take the sword.

Take it, step forward to this bitter starting point,

And do not be a coward, do not think of them,

How sweet they are, and how you are their mother. Just for

This one short day be forgetful of your children,

Afterward weep; for even though you will kill them,

They were very dear—Oh, I am an unhappy woman!

In line 1210, Medea gives out a short speech to express her intention to kill her children. In these fifteen lines, she sadly declares the murder to be good for her children. The reason why she wants to kill her children is because her mad love toward Jason. She uses her children as the media to murder Jason’s new bride. After her children involved into the murder, she kills them for the reason which they may be killed by others because of their unintentional deeds. Rather than seeing her children die in other people’s hands, Medea would kill them herself in order to feel less guilty. In the passage, “fixed” is used to describe Medea’s plan. “Fixed” can also be substituted with “unchanging”, but I think “fixed” is better which gives an action of something is fixed and can’t not be changed. In the last line of this passage, Medea feels “unhappy”. I feel like “unhappy” is not strong enough to represent her true feeling. I prefer to use “wretched”, “sorrowful” or “depressed” to describe Medea’s mood which may be more closed to her heartbroken emotion.  

In this passage, it focuses on Medea’s dreadful deed of killing her own children. Her madness of love makes her sacrifice her dear children in order to revenge her husband. That is, she is so deeply in love that she can’t accept the truth that her husband didn't love her anymore. In these lines, Medea tries to determine her heart to kill her beloved ones. She struggles but still determines to do the cruel deed. By focusing on this passage, I can only know how Medea thoughts but not Jason’s reaction toward the bloody deed. However, Medea’s mad love is still strongly represented here.