What is the role of children in "Medea" and "The Just

AS and A Level Psychology

World Literature Assignment 1

The comparison of the texts

Medea by Euripides and

The Just by Albert Camus

Essay Title: What is the role of children in “Medea” and “The Just”?

By: Mateusz Litewski

What is the role of children in “Medea” and “The Just”?

Children play a very important part in both texts, Medea and The Just. Both playwrights make use of them in different ways, making them crucial in setting the mood, evoking sympathy, as well as to present characters in the play.

One of the main roles of children in both texts is to evoke sympathy of the reader or the audience. It must be underlined that plays were made to be watched rather than to be read, so we should talk here about an audience. This is due to the fact that it is a part of human nature to be compassionate to children. Primarily we associate them with innocence. Children are almost always associated with being pure and clean, we think of them as people that haven’t lived long enough to dirty themselves with sin and misdeed and therefore don’t deserve anything bad to happen to them. In both texts children are shown to fit the above description and therefore provoke the feelings and emotions that I discussed.

The appeal for sympathy is mainly due to the innocent portrayal of the children. This issue seems to be very explicit, for example in Medea, where the chorus constantly comments on their helplessness and laments their fate – ”Miserable woman, you must be made of stone or iron, to kill to kill the fruit of your womb”. The chorus’ cries, making us feel the same way. Their viewpoint is that of the audience, reflecting its feelings and making it share those of the chorus. The Just also achieves this, although in a more questionable manner. While Yanek presents the idea of children as being innocent and pure, his belief is confronted by the Grand Duchess. Yanek beliefs the children are a sanctum, that no evil can come to – reminiscing his youth, where he “always drove like a madman, because I wasn’t afraid of anything…except of running down a child”. This shows us how much Yanek cares for children, being able to do anything else, than to hurt a child. Although this comes from a terrorist on a mission to kill, these words are admirable and evoke sympathy, due to his appreciation of innocence. However, his belief is distorted when the Grand Duchess visits him in prison, later in the play. By giving us a contrasting picture she changes our perception of the children, saying, for example, “My niece is a heartless little girl; she always refuses to give anything to the poor when she’s asked to. She won’t go near them”. This presents the children in a more ambiguous light, showing that Yanek’s sanctum is not as pure as he thought it was. Thus both texts portray the children as innocent – a symbol of purity and youth. Although the extent of such a portrayal is varied in Medea and The Just, the main principle remains to be the same.

This picture of innocence is contrasted with the ‘evil doers’ of the children.

Ironically,

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This picture of innocence is contrasted with the ‘evil doers’ of the children.

Ironically,

The group of terrorists, who are a symbol of evil and terror in today’s world, seems to be divided about the decision of Yanek not to throw a bomb into the carriage where the grand Duke was travelling, because inside the carriage, there were children. The author, by placing a symbol of evil and harm, terrorists, on one side and children, the symbol of innocence and purity, on the other side, creates a contrast and conflict that provokes the audience to think. Most of the group agrees that it cannot be “tolerated for a moment the idea of children being blown to pieces by our bombs”. The innocence of children seems to be far more important and precious than the lives of older people who have lost their innocence. This seems to be ironic and strange, as we often associate terrorists to be like Stepan appears; cruel, inhumane and wicked. But here, with the use of children, we are presented with the idea that this stereotype might be wrong, and ‘good terrorists’ also exist. This creates a certain ambiguity and doubt in the minds of the audience, and I believe is a key role of children in this text.

In Medea, the children we see are the offspring of the relationship that Medea (that has betrayed her father to protect Jason) and the rightful king of Iolcus, Jason, once had. This sacrifice that Medea has done has cost her dearly and has been egoistically used by Jason, who has abandoned her, in order to marry the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. Medea, wants revenge and fairness for the harm that has been done to her. However, when we are presented with Medea’s plan of revenge, we begin to see Medea in a different light. We find that she is ready to sacrifice everything (even the lives of her own children) in order to make the revenge perfect. This allows for further sympathy with the children, due to their unawareness of the horrible fate that awaits them and the lack of a possibility to protect themselves. This cruelty and blind seeking of revenge done by Medea allows us to form an impression and opinion towards her. The children play, in both texts, a symbol- the ‘thin red line’, that separates the good from the evil. Both Yanek and Medea cross the line. The use of children in the texts and the main characters’ behaviour towards the children make us feel a certain way towards their perpetrators.

This applies to Medea, who we find repulsive and evil because of her ruthlessness, her lack of limits and boundaries that could possibly stop her and her complete determination to achieve her goal at all costs. However, this also intrigues us and makes her great, quite ironically. This is because her courage, determination, combined with her intelligence, manipulative skills and total devotion to a cause are unordinary and rare. The fact that she will not stop until she gets what she wants might be immoral and wrong, but it is grand at the same time. The children are merely observers and are caught up in the events taking place in the play.

The children bring the drama and ambiguity into the play, allowing for these mixed feelings to form. One the one hand we sympathise with Medea, as quite obviously she has been treaded unfairly and selfishly by Jason, which allows her to desire revenge. However, this is in conflict with the extent of revenge that Medea plans. In my opinion, Euripides has done this purposefully; in order to show the tragedy of the situation- no matter what choice Medea makes (to carry out her plan, or not to carry it out and flee) it will have tragic consequences. Whatever justice that takes place is wrong and unjust at the same time, thus presenting us with a tragic and impossible to solve problem.

The events seen in The Just bring us to a question that we have to answer ourselves: ‘does the end justify the means’, where the aim is the revolution and a world free of tyranny. The means, here, are the killing and the possible innocent people that could suffer. While the children don’t seize our sympathy very easily, unlike Medea, the image of a child still allows for us to form a strong opinion of an answer to this question. This thought provoking questions and issues seem to be another role of children, in both texts; to allow the reader to associate himself with a character, or an attitude present in the play.

The children, as I mentioned, are cruicial to mood and atmosphere in both texts. In The Just they introduce doubt and conflict into the group, dividing it into those who believe that the children were innocent and therefore didn’t deserve to die, and those who thought otherwise. The scenes of children being in danger make us feel pathos and we are pulled into the action, anticipating the upcoming events. This can be very well shown in The Just, where the action and mood are very intense. 88888******************************************************************************************************************************

The forming of an attitude towards characters in the plays seems to be one of the roles of children. In The Just I sympathise with Yanek Kaliayev, who decides to withdraw from carrying out the assassination of the Grand Duke, as this would unavoidably cause the death of two children- the niece and the nephew of the grand Duke. I believe this view would be shared by most of the audience. ”I never thought it would be like that…children… oh no, not children”. At this point of the play, the audience is thinking like the protagonist – that an innocent life cannot be sacrificed while achieving a goal, a revolution in this case. While most of the group thinks similarly to Yanek and gives him no stress about his withdrawal from the mission, Stepan appears to be different. This contrast becomes very visible, exactly by the use of children, and characters’ attitude towards them. Stepan seems to be a ruthless revolutionary, only concerned with orders and carrying them out. We usually don’t sympathise with people who don’t like children, seeing them as insensitive and numb. Yanek, however, is a poet with a romantic soul that believes in the revolution and the righteousness of it. He believes that by saving the lives of those children, he himself preserved his innocence, rather than becoming a ruthless murderer, as that is the enemy they are fighting. “I have chosen death to prevent murder from triumphing in the world… I have chosen to be innocent”, he says to Stepan, after being faced with numerous accusations and insults. His desire to preserve the life of the innocent is admirable and seizes the audience’s sympathy.

To summarise, the roles of children in Medea and The Just, can be shortly listed. Firstly, it is to provoke sympathy of the audience towards them, make us associate us with them and what concerns them. They also allow the audience to come to opinions on different characters in the play and to look at them from different points of view. The situation and context that the children are in provoke thought and questions to arise in the minds of the spectators. Lastly, they allow us to notice the tragedy of the events we see on stage.