Impressive post, thank you. My Medea is a bit rusty, and I haven't read Edwards's book, but it seems to me from people I have worked with that the pain of betrayal is as much epistemological as ethical.
That is, above and beyond the question, "How could this person have done this to me?" is the question, "How could I have not seen this coming?" or "How is it that this is not the person I thought s/he was?" It is not merely a moral injury, but a sense that one is losing one's powers of interpersonal reality testing and recognition.
So for most people, if not for Medea or Edwards, the most challenging thing is not foregoing revenge, but being able to trust again in the future. One can't trust if one feels unable to gauge others well enough to reasonably assess the possibility of another betrayal down the line.
I did not include the section on trust that I wrote because it made for such a long post. Hillman's article on betrayal is also about the process of forgiveness. He would say that of course there will be more betrayals, because they are necessary to break the paradisical bubble we keep trying to construct and because life in paradise is stagnant.
What drew me to write about Medea in the first place is that she did these horrific things and yet suffers no punishment; in fact at the end of the play, she goes off in a chariot of fire provided by her grandfather Helios. This seemed at odds with the Greek notions of justice so I knew there had to be something that made her actions other than what they seemed to my modern eyes. It is Jason who is utterly ruined in the play.
This is was a fascinating observation, but I wonder if it's important to discuss Ms. Edwards' advanced illness and what must be an extreme understanding on her part of mortality and lifespan. Maybe this is coming into play regarding her decision to share her side of the story in such a public, detailed fashion, and not just a need for revenge (although that could surely be there also)?
Her illness does not make the need for public airing of the marital issues necessary unless there is another and likely at least partly unconscious motive at work. I wrote what I see as an interesting possibility but I do not presume to know more than what we have seen and heard.
water seeks its own level;
to air her dirty laundy for all to see and smell is self-destructive. She doesn't see it as Medea. She wants to be seen as a martyr, with all the tragedy in her life, she wants the p.r. as the strong link in the chain.
it was her illness and the stress of it on her husband that caused his attention to be diverted. he needed a change, to let go and disappear; it was the consequences of that disappearance that did not factor into his fantasy.
She is a lawyer and should be strategic enough to know that this is the iceberg that sunk the Titanic.
Having lost all of her pride, wearing no clothes, the empress destroys her husband and herself... a real greek tragedy.
if she was a heroine, she would have looked on the sunny side: her husband's loss of one child, was gained with another...now that's a mitzvah; she's long past procreation, even without her illness.
it'll make a great movie... sally field and richard gere!!
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