Let’s travel back to the year 431 BCE and look at some dark story magic from ancient Athens. Today’s lesson in emotional spellcasting comes from the Medea, a play by the youngest of the three great classical Greek tragedians, Euripides.
The Medea in One Sentence
A divine sorceress must exact spectacular revenge on the husband who left her for the local king’s daughter, even if it means killing her own sons by him.
Casting Emotional Spells: Making Your Audience Want Terrible Things
We’ll talk more about a spoiler philosophy for Lit in One Sentence soon. I have some thoughts and would love to hear from subscribers how all of you would like to see these handled.
But since this story has been out for 2455 years and the title character is pretty synonymous with her crime, I’m going to go ahead and spoil it for you: she kills the boys!
And, by the end of the play when she does it, we want her to! We would in fact feel horribly cheated if she did anything else. Though, of course, who doesn’t think a mother murdering her own children is one of the most abominable crimes?
How does Euripides cast this grisly spell on us, and what can you do if you want to achieve a similar effect, having your audiences cheer on something we would normally find gruesome?
There are three important things he does and we can unfurl them all from the One Sentence above.
1. He Grounds Us Firmly in Medea’s Head
Six main characters are mentioned in the sentence:
the divine sorceress: Medea, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, niece of the witch Circe, and princess of Colchis, which is in the present day country of Georgia
her husband: Jason, leader of the Argonauts, seeker of the Golden Fleece
the local king: Creon, King of Corinth
the local king’s daughter: the Princess
Medea and Jason’s two sons
Audiences approaching any narrative ever are looking first for a main character we can identify with, whose consciousness we will inhabit. Our emotional reactions to all events in the story will be calibrated according to whose story it is, and how the events are impacting this person.
In her book Wired for Story, Lisa Cron explains how we mirror fictional characters through our mirror neuron system, which “allows us to feel what others experience almost as if it were happening to us.” As she puts it, “when we’re fully engaged in a story, our own boundaries dissolve. We become the protagonist, feeling what she feels, wanting what she wants, fearing what she fears — we literally mirror her every thought.”
“This isn’t to say we won’t feel what other characters feel as well,” Cron adds. “But ultimately, what other characters do, think, and feel will itself be measured by its effect on the protagonist.”
As you can probably guess from the name of the play and the first four words of the sentence, this is unquestionably Medea’s story. She is on stage nearly the whole time, commanding our attention as no other character comes even close to doing. We have no choice but to align ourselves with her consciousness, mirroring her emotions as we interpret the events of the play based on how they impact her.
She’s also a clever villain — her name is derived from a word meaning “clever” — sharing her plans, outsmarting the opposition, quickly honing in on her opponents’ vulnerabilities and desires, and exploiting these to put different pieces of her revenge plot in place. Without fully knowing what she has in mind, we have no reason not to be on her side through all this.
Euripides wrote this play for the Great Dionysia, an annual theatre festival where all the actors and his entire audience would have been male. Some scholars have wondered whether he meant his audience to identify more with Jason, who spouts a lot of the typical patriarchal views they would probably have shared.
But others have pointed out that Medea is a much more persuasive speaker. All Jason’s language is hollow and many of the points he tries to make are undermined elsewhere in the play. He tries to tell Medea he’s looking out for their sons by fathering royal brothers for them, which will be an advantage, while Creon and the princess make it clear they want Medea to get out of the city and take her boys with her.
Anyway, whether we’re 5th century Athenian men or 21st century readers, once we are already measuring everything that happens based on how it impacts Medea, who commands the stage before any of these other characters appear, we’d need to perform tremendous mental gymnastics to recalibrate the play according to how everything impacts a different character. For example, once Jason finally appears, to figure out how every event in the play — past, present, and future — would look through his eyes instead, especially while Euripides moves the action forward doing nothing to help us out with this.
The remaining main characters have even less time on stage and speak fewer lines, if any, compared to Jason. We have no choice but to mirror primarily Medea, which means wanting what she wants.
2. He Gives Medea a Clear Goal — Revenge
Cron also talks about how important it is for protagonists to have a clear goal that “bestows meaning on everything that happens.” It’s an emotional yardstick and audiences can’t help but measure the importance of everything else in the play by whether it moves the protagonist closer to or farther from her goal.
The first time Medea comes on stage, she addresses the chorus of local Corinthian women and makes it abundantly clear what her only goal is: revenge against her husband.
We also get a clue about the possible scope of this revenge within the first hundred lines of the play, when the nurse in Medea’s household first worries she might “kill both the monarch and his daughter’s new bridegroom,” then warns their tutor to keep the children “well secluded from their mother”:
I’ve seen her cast a savage look at them,
As though she’s contemplating doing something to them.
I know for sure she won’t relent her anger
until she’s struck some victim to the ground—
but when she does, may it be enemies, not friends.
Here, Euripides has just shown us Chekhov’s gun, so to speak. He’ll need to fire it before the end of the play or we as an audience will feel cheated and wonder why he made it clear the children aren’t safe from Medea in the first place.
Without this dramatic promise, maybe killing other characters who aren’t her children would seem to audiences like enough of a revenge for Medea, and indeed there are older versions of the myth that present alternate possibilities like this.
But from the moment Euripides invokes the much more horrific possibility, anything short of it would be anticlimatic. We, the audience, will be anticipating the worst for the rest of the play, so Medea’s revenge won’t feel particularly spectacular unless it actually happens.
3. He Makes Revenge More Important Than the Boys Throughout
Euripides could have made Medea’s goal within the story successful escape, taking both of her children with her alive, but he doesn’t.
In the middle of the play, Medea negotiates a safe refuge for herself with Aegeus, the king of Athens, if she should ever need to flee Corinth. She never mentions the boys. Neither does he.
Towards the end of the play, Medea — who is, if I haven’t emphasized this enough, a very powerful witch, with a very interesting sense of humor, like her playwright — sends her boys bearing poisoned gifts to her husband’s new bride: a crown that sets her hair on fire that the princess can’t shake off her head, and that doubles in intensity every time she tries, and a finespun robe that eats through the poor girl’s milky flesh, trapping and killing her father too as he’s lamenting her corpse later. That struggle is terrible.
Of course, we’ve never once been invited to feel the tiniest bit of sympathy for these two characters. Instead, Euripides seems to invite us to respond exactly as Medea does, to experience “twice the pleasure if they met their end most horribly.”
Medea had no way of knowing her boys wouldn’t touch these charming gifts, by the way. She just never cares.
Right before she kills her children, she does pause to debate whether or not she should go through with it. But since she’s never once cared about their safety in the play up until this moment, we would find it a bit weird and disappointing if she changed her tune in the final act.
We see and hear almost nothing of the boys themselves, who speak only one line before their murder scene. Even they don’t bother trying to plead with directly with their mother not to kill them, instead appealing to the chorus — which is supposed to be a dramatic projection of us, the audience — to intervene. The chorus do nothing.
I don’t think any of us want them to.
After killing the boys, Medea flies off in her glorious dragon chariot, while below her, Jason falls flaccidly to the stage, utterly destroyed. And, unlike on the vases pictured above, in the play she takes their bodies with her so Jason can’t bury them properly, though he begs her to let him do at least that.
If she’d had the boys alive with her, her spectacular revenge would not have been complete. Jason could have followed her to Athens and tried to get the boys back. The king of Athens, who mentioned wanting heirs of his own earlier, might be sympathetic to his cause.
Medea and Jason’s story wouldn’t really be over, or at least we the audience wouldn’t have the sense that it truly was.
Most importantly, the revenge we’ve been primed to want and expect right from the start would be only partially complete. After the deaths of the princess and Creon, we need an even grander finale. What other options does Medea have? She could hardly kill Jason in a more comically violent way than what we’ve already seen, and the most spectacular revenge possible is to kill his sons and leave him with absolutely nothing.
By the time Euripides gets us to the end of this play, the only way we’re going to experience any dramatic satisfaction is if Medea murders her children.
The playwright has been casting his spell on us since the very beginning, and we are as ensnared in Medea’s desire for revenge as the princess and Creon were in her poisoned, finespun robe.
In Conclusion
Euripides chose the perfect crime to demonstrate how we audiences can be made to want the most terrible things once we’re in the thrall of a powerful witch and a more powerful playwright.
Not only are the children are completely innocent victims, but the spell works as well on us today as it did on the Athenian citizens of antiquity.
It doesn’t matter what beliefs about the relationships between men and women, maternal feeling and patriarchal oppression, reason and emotion, or anything else we bring with us as we settle in with this story.
We were all children, we know what that feels like. Every one of us was dependent on a parent or guardian for our basic survival once. We can all conjure the visceral terror of a protector suddenly turning destroyer.
We can never fully lose sight of the horror of Medea’s act. And we can’t help wanting her to do it either.
Questions for You
Are there other clever story villains you’ve enjoyed cheering on? What terrible things did they do?
And how are you feeling about Medea right now?
🔪 She sounds awesome! Ready to cheer this child murderess on!
❓ Not sure, I would have to see or read the play, but at least I’m curious!
🚫 What? No! Child murder is always wrong! I am very disturbed by all this.
Feel free to vote with an emoji and unpack your answer in the comments below, which are only visible to paying subscriberss of Lit in One Sentence, not the whole internet.
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Mine is below the fold.