Let me start this post by saying that I am and have been a great admirer of Elizabeth Edwards since the 2004 campaign. And, while he was in the race, I was a supporter of John Edwards also, because of his willingness to speak for the poor. But something has been nagging at me since the flurry of interviews with Elizabeth has been appearing. And that something crystallized for me when I watched the first part of Charlie Rose's interview with her Thursday night. I did my dissertation on Medea and the Medea complex, which I believe is often in play when a woman feels betrayed. And I believe that there is an element of it in play now with John and Elizabeth Edwards.
What brought this into focus for me was the following:
"I believed we had a marriage in which this could not happen" -- Elizabeth Edwards on Charlie Rose, May 14
So let's look at Elizabeth Edwards' book in light of Medea.
The pattern Medea follows to get her man—the woman who falls in love with the heroic man and gives up her independent life to serve her lover’s life—is a familiar theme among women, To Medea, the promise Jason makes to her in return for her assistance in gaining the Golden Fleece is binding. Medea is a foreigner, from Colchis. In her culture, oaths have the strength of law whereas Jason, the Greek, is from a culture of law. In essence they speak the same words with different meanings. “Medea and Jason are not members of the same speech community; coming from different communities and even different strata of history, it seems likely that they never shared the same assumptions about oaths—hence the impossibility of their successfully swearing an oath together”(Rabinowitz, p. 138). For her, the sacrifice of her home and family in exchange for marriage to Jason is binding and permanent and any deviance from it is betrayal of an immeasurable kind. “The oldest doctrine was that oath-breaking was twin to kin murder, these two being initially the only crimes of interest to the pre-Olympian divinities”(Burnett, p. 13).
"We can be truly betrayed only where we truly trust – by brothers, lovers, wives, husbands, not by enemies, not by strangers. The greater the love and loyalty, the involvement and commitment, the greater the betrayal. Trust has in it the seed of betrayal; the serpent was in the garden from the beginning…Trust and the possibility of betrayal come into the world at the same moment" (Hillman, p. 66).
The depth of the betrayal is directly related to the importance of the relationship and the degree to which one trusts the other. Medea has told us she believed in, trusted in the integrity and strength of the oaths that she and Jason swore to each other, and having fulfilled her part of the bargain, assumed and expected that Jason would also, not only while it was convenient but for the rest of their lives.
To believe that one can count on another to never hurt or betray or violate trust in any way is naïve and is to live in a bubble of unreality. Primal trust, arising from the relationship between infant and mother, even that trust, gets broken as the mother does not come immediately to soothe the infant or fails to correctly identify the source of difficulty. Development requires betrayal in order to develop tolerance for the frustration of ordinary failures in relationship and the resilience to not only survive but learn from them. “The broken promise is a breakthrough of life in the world of Logos security, where the order of everything can be depended upon and the past guarantees the future.” (Hillman, p. 71) Medea’s belief in the inviolability of the oath sworn by Jason is her own Apollonian aspect come into play, a vesting of power in word. It calls forth the chaos of Dionysus in Jason with his betrayal, which smashes open the fragile vessel of their marriage.
Edwards, in her conversation with Rose, talks about the reality that some 70% of marriages do not survive the death of a child and that she thought because they had, they did not have to worry, that they were over the worst thing that could happen.
Betrayal, in breaking trust and breaking open the vessel, affords an opportunity for increased consciousness and understanding. However, we cannot assume that betrayal alone brings increased awareness as “marriages are full of betrayals committed but not comprehended—in which case, there can be no transformation.” (Carotenuto, 1996, p. 76). Marriage offers the opportunity, through the process of engaging with another and dealing with the negotiation of differences, to retrieve and make conscious that which has been projected out onto the partner. This is a painful and deflating process, as it requires the increasing awareness of one’s own dark side or shadow.
Neither Medea nor Jason changes much in their marriage, except that they become more of what they were to begin with. Rather than becoming deeper and fuller through the process of being married, they each become more one-sided. Jason becomes even more ambitious, more out of touch with his feelings and the feelings of others, as we see in his response to Medea. While the deeds committed by Medea for him were hers, she did them explicitly for Jason and thus, they belong to him as well as to her, though he claims no responsibility for them. Jason, through his willful blindness, remains unaware of his own shadow and believes himself unsullied by his wife’s actions. Medea, though more aware of herself than Jason, changes only in that the enchantment with her hero is broken and her trust in their oaths shattered. There is no indication that she learns from this experience that at the point of choosing Jason, the wanting to be wanted by him, is the beginning of her responsibility for what has happened. Blinded by her rage at having been betrayed, she sees only Jason’s guilt and none of her own.
In his play, Medea, Brendan Kennelly has her say:
Do you believe that men and women
are now living under a new heartless, mindless morality?
Unhappiness is the willful forsaking of the proven ways.
An oath is an oath.
Break an oath and the agile demons
of unhappiness leap through your
eyes and mind
and consume your soul.
As Carotenuto (1996) points out, a near-inevitable point in the process of dealing with betrayal is “Why did he do it?” or “What did I do wrong?” The betrayed feels that the act was personal, aimed directly at the one betrayed, a deliberate attempt to wound in a most vulnerable place. Medea is no different. In her mind, Jason’s betrayal is personal because she does not want to see that foremost for him all along has been his ambition, his quest, that the oath was sworn to achieve his goals, the marriage made because of business more than desire. The impact of betrayal is devastating, shattering the foundation of the relationship. The betrayer and the betrayed have been locked into an impossible relationship, a state of fusion in which each is expected to remain perfectly true. The one betrayed is as one abandoned. The pain is visceral – Medea laments, “A lost woman is a problem. Jason, answer me this. Where am I to turn?”(Kennelly, 1991, p. 37). For Jason, that Medea would experience his choice to marry Glauke as a betrayal, as pain never entered the equation. In this, as in all of his choices, benefit to Jason has been the determining factor, not love. “All things considered, having asked everything of our partner, we are also convinced we have given everything. We do not realize that it is precisely in that request and the absolute surrender of ourselves that the seed of imminent abandonment lies, one of the possible forms of which is betrayal.” (Carotenuto, p. 88)
"Every psychological extreme secretly contains its own opposite or stands in some sort of intimate and essential relation to it. Indeed it is from this tension that it derives its peculiar dynamism. There is no hallowed custom that cannot on occasion turn into its opposite, and the more extreme a position is, the more easily may we expect an enantiodromia, a conversion of something into its opposite" (Jung, para. 581).
Certainly, we can see this in Medea, as her love for Jason turns to hatred and rage. Even in this, the potential for forgiveness is not lost, if the partners, in confronting their own previously hidden dark and negative feelings, can own them and integrate them into the relationship. However, to do so is to forever forego the paradise of the idealized relationship, where love and harmony are valued above all else and where hatred and rage are experienced as alien and demonic. The confrontation with what has previously been projected outward – which means becoming aware of and owning shadow aspects that have been projected onto the partner – expands consciousness and offers the potential for the kind of marriage that Jung envisioned as the coniunctio. Neither Medea nor Jason succeeds in this.
There can be no doubt that revenge is the path that Medea’s response to betrayal takes. In her final encounter with Jason, after the deaths of the children, Medea shoots her last arrows at him.
I have done it: because I loathed you more
Than I loved them. Mine is the triumph.
I would still laugh…I’d still be joyful
To know that every bone of your life is broken; you are left
hopeless, friendless, mateless, childless.
Go down to your ship Argo and weep
beside it, that rotting hulk on the harbor –beach
Drawn dry astrand, never to be launched again – even the weeds
and barnacles on the warped keel
Are dead and stink: --that’s your last companion—
And only hope: for some time one of the rotting timbers
Will fall on your head and kill you—meanwhile sit there
and mourn, remembering the infinite evil, and the good
That has turned evil...
You had love
and betrayed it; now of all men
You are utterly the most miserable. As I of women.
But I, a woman, a foreigner, alone
Against you and the might of Corinth—have met you throat
for throat, evil for evil. Now I go forth
Under the cold eyes of the weakness-despising stars: --not me
they scorn. (Jeffers, p. 189- 191)
Revenge can be quite satisfying because it allows one to feel that a score has been settled. However, revenge does not lead to anything new or to expanded consciousness or relationship. Medea wants to even the score with Jason, to strike him where he will hurt, as she has been hurt. Kennelly tells us, “Medea, as I imagined her, plans to educate Jason in the consciousness of horror; she destroys his world but leaves him intact; and she instructs him very calmly and lucidly in the appalling consequences of this intactness…Medea, as I see her, inflicts on Jason the ultimate cruelty: she sentences him to life.”(Kennelly, p.8) In not leaving John but choosing to remain married to him and in talking about what a good man he is at the same time that she reveals with a surgical precision the details of what happened in their marriage, Elizabeth, like Medea, destroys his world while leaving him intact.
Jason’s part of Medea’s story ends with him sitting on the beach under the hulk of the Argo, now wrecked and decaying. Unlike other Greek heroes – Herakles for example—Jason does not become an immortal but instead dies when the oak timber which was carved into a figurehead from his ship falls upon his head (Graves, 1944, p. 370). Jason’s failure to move out of his one-sidedness and commitment to his ambitions leads finally to his death.
There is no question that Elizabeth Edwards' anger is justified. But in making this sad chapter in their marriage a focal point in her book, she manages to step into the web of the Medea complex. Though she told Charlie Rose she wrote the book because she wants her children to know about her marriage and her husband from her, that really doesn't work as a reason given that she could have written about it all just for them. But in publishing it, she opens them to having to deal with gossip and innuendo in addition to the death of their mother, which may well occur before the children are old enough to apprehend any of this. And the book conclusively eliminates all but the remotest possibility of a political future for John, no matter how far in the future he might try. So in her way she leaves John sitting on the beach next to the wreckage of his career much as Medea left Jason. And much of the public will see his fate as deserved and her as the innocent. But is it ever that simple?
Burnett, A. (1973). Medea and the Tragedy of Revenge. Classical Philology, 68, 1-24.
Carotenuto, A. (1996). To Love, To Betray. Evanston, IL: Chiron Books.
Hillman, J. (1976). Loose Ends. Dallas Spring Publications.
Jeffers, R. (1970). Medea. NY: New Directions Books.
Jung, C. G. (1967). Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 5 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kennelly, B. (1991). Euripides' Medea, a New Version. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe Books.
Rabinowitz, N. S. (1993). Anxiety Veiled. Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press.