Medea

Medea is invoked as a classical figure whose story gives the book a language for thinking about maternal violence without reducing it to a single explanation. In the account attributed to Euripides, she kills her children to hurt the man who has abandoned her. The book returns to that act as a point of tension between revenge and care, and between the cultural image of the mother as protector and the possibility that a mother may also destroy.

The Classical Story and Its Echoes

The book invokes Medea alongside La Llorona, a figure whose story is told in variations across Latin America. In many versions, a woman drowns her children after being seduced, impregnated, and abandoned, with infanticide presented against a background of limited prospects for survival. Other versions make neglect, resentment, or revenge central. Medea belongs to this wider pattern of stories in which the children become the means by which a woman strikes at the man who has left her. The recurring plot links maternal violence to abandonment and anger, while the varying details show how the same mythic elements can be rearranged across cultures.

The comparison also clarifies a difference in what follows the act. In the account of La Llorona, the children’s deaths lead to the mother’s suicide and a punishment of endless wandering and grief near water. Medea is invoked more briefly, as the classical precedent for a mother who turns against her children in order to injure an abandoning man. The book uses the two figures not as identical characters but as related forms of a story about loss, revenge, and the consequences attached to maternal violence.

A Conflict Within the Mother

The book describes modern readings of Medea as a conflict between masculine and feminine aspects. The masculine aspect drives toward action, framing the sacrifice of the children as terrible but heroic in service of a greater cause; the maternal, caring aspect resists and presses for the children to remain alive. In the book’s account of Euripides, the masculine aspect ultimately prevails. This interpretation makes Medea’s story a struggle between opposing impulses rather than a simple illustration of a supposedly uniform maternal instinct.

The contrast is sharpened through Norma, the central figure in Vincenzo Bellini’s opera. Like Medea, Norma has been betrayed by the lover who fathered her children and approaches the possibility of killing them. But she draws back, and the caring aspect wins. The juxtaposition makes the outcome itself meaningful: both figures face betrayal and contemplate violence, yet the narratives divide at the point where one proceeds and the other stops.

The Book’s Present-Day Argument

Medea’s story also sits within the book’s wider examination of violence against children. The narrator observes that contemporary public imagination often casts the predatory stranger as the archetypal danger, while violence in the home remains a grave threat. The book cites the claim that domestic violence kills thousands of children each year in Europe, and contrasts the familiar literary image of Medea with cases in which men going through divorce kill their children in the hope of devastating the mother. The comparison shifts attention from the assumption that maternal violence is the defining form of infanticide to the broader question of how children become targets in adult conflict.

Medea therefore functions less as a character with a developed life in the book than as a recurring interpretive figure. Her story brings the book’s questions into focus: whether care is an inevitable force or a contested one, how abandonment and revenge shape accounts of violence, and why cultural narratives so often make the mother the central image of a crime that is not confined to mothers. An epigraph from Euripides names her, while the surrounding discussion turns the ancient tragedy into a frame for examining present-day assumptions about motherhood and responsibility.