Medea (Euripides, 431 BC) begins with a nurse at the door of a house in Corinth, wishing the ship Argo had never sailed for Colchis. Inside, her mistress will not eat, lies weeping and cannot bear the sight of her children; the nurse is afraid of what she may be planning. Jason, for whom Medea betrayed her father and left her homeland, has abandoned her to marry the daughter of King Creon. She is heard crying out inside the house; when she comes out, though, she speaks calmly to the women of Corinth and tells them that of all creatures with life and sense, women are the most wretched, buying with their dowry a husband who becomes their master. The king banishes her and her children; she wins one day’s grace and uses it to send the bride a poisoned dress and crown. The princess burns to death, and her father dies embracing her. Then Medea kills her two sons and escapes in the chariot of the Sun with their bodies. Jason curses her; she answers that the fault is his.
// The theoryNeither mad nor monster
Feminist criminology emerged in the 1970s with a simple criticism: the discipline had studied almost only men, and when it looked at women offenders it did so through stereotypes. Carol Smart (1976) showed how their crimes were explained by biology, sexuality or illness, never by the same social reasons as men’s. Researchers such as Belinda Morrissey later studied the narratives about women who kill and found two dominant scripts: the madwoman, who is denied responsibility, and the monster, who is denied humanity. Both have the same effect: they prevent us from understanding the woman as someone who decides.
Spouse revenge filicide
In 1969 the psychiatrist Phillip Resnick classified cases of parents who kill their children and described a specific category: spouse revenge filicide, in which the child becomes the instrument for harming the partner. It is the rarest of his categories and the one most reminiscent of Medea. Later research finds this pattern in both men and women, and associates it with conflictive separations. What feminist criminology adds is that, when a man commits it, he is rarely called Medea.
// The subjectA foreigner with nothing to lose
Euripides does not present Medea as mad. On the contrary: she is the most lucid person in the play. She calculates, pretends to be reconciled with Jason, prepares the poison and chooses the moment. Her situation is also that of someone with no way out: she is a foreigner, she has betrayed her family, she has no city to return to and she is about to be exiled with two children. Her famous speech on the condition of women, who must buy a husband with their dowry and accept a master, is one of the theatre’s oldest criticisms of women’s situation. None of this justifies what she does, but it explains why her revenge aims at the only thing she can still take from Jason.
The text gives her three moments in which we watch someone think. Before Creon, who admits he fears her because she is clever and versed in evil arts, she begs for a single day; as soon as the king has gone, she tells the chorus she would never have fawned on him except to gain something by it. Then Aegeus appears, king of Athens, on his way back from consulting the oracle at Delphi because he has no children; Medea makes him swear by Earth and Sun that he will take her in, and only once her escape is secured does she lay out her whole plan. Finally, in the great monologue, she changes her mind several times as she looks at the children, softens, hardens again and gives her reasons: she will not leave them for enemies to abuse, nor can she bear the thought of those enemies laughing at her. None of these scenes fits the madwoman of tradition, nor the monster either, because Euripides makes her hesitate in front of the audience. What they show is a woman who weighs the cost of every step, the highest one included.
Medea
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// The crackUnderstanding is not justifying, nor absolving
The feminist reading of Medea has an obvious risk: turning a woman who killed her children into a heroine of resistance. Feminist criminology does not intend that. What it asks is that Medea be treated as what she is in the play, a person who chooses, and that her crime be analyzed with the same tools as a man’s. The children are the victims, and no injustice suffered by their mother changes that.
There is a second limit. Medea is a myth, and myths tend to fix stereotypes rather than describe reality. Studies of filicidal mothers show that most real cases are associated with serious mental illness, isolation or abuse, and very few with calculated revenge. The risk of Medea is that the exception becomes the image.
Vicarious violence
Since 2021 Spanish law has recognized vicarious violence: harming children in order to make the mother suffer, a form of gender violence committed in the great majority of cases by men against their partners or former partners. The oldest literary figure of that violence is a woman, Medea, which echoes what feminist criminology points out: myths fix the image of a crime, and they do not always match who commits it in reality. Preventing it requires attention to conflictive separations and to threats that use children as weapons.
Three key ideas
- Feminist criminology (Smart, 1976; Morrissey, 2003) criticizes the explanation of women who kill as madwomen or monsters, rather than as people who decide.
- Medea, a foreigner and abandoned, kills Jason’s new wife, the king and her own children to destroy him: the “spouse revenge filicide” described by Resnick (1969).
- The crack: understanding Medea does not absolve her, and the myth does not describe reality: most real filicides are associated with illness, isolation or abuse, and vicarious violence is mostly committed by men.
Sources · further reading
- Smart, C. (1976). Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- Resnick, P. J. (1969). “Child Murder by Parents: A Psychiatric Review of Filicide”. American Journal of Psychiatry, 126(3), 325-334.
- Morrissey, B. (2003). When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity. Routledge.
- Euripides (431 BC). Medea.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Medea?
Medea is a villain from Greek tragedy, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. She had one day left before exile.
Why does Medea become a villain?
Feminist criminology rescues Medea from the two usual labels, madwoman or monster: Euripides makes her lucid, foreign and cornered, which forces us to read her crime as a decision.
Which criminological theory explains Medea?
Medea's case is analysed through Feminist criminology. Feminist criminology points out that the discipline was built by studying men, and that women who offend have been explained as sick or as monsters rather than as people who make decisions. Medea (Euripides, 431 BC) is the figure from which that double label comes. A foreigner, abandoned by Jason so that he can marry the daughter of the king of Corinth, and sentenced to exile, she kills the bride and the king with a poisoned dress and then her two sons, to destroy Jason. Psychiatry would call “spouse revenge filicide” what Euripides wrote as tragedy.
