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sara.gladwin's picture

I think it depends on what

I think it depends on what you are pointing to in this as magical thinking. To me, the thought "this I can do" is not magical because it reveals the character’s belief that killing her children is her only option. Similarly with Sethe, who is literally driven into a barn with her children where she physically cannot escape, and feels that her only option is to end the lives of her children and then end her own life. However, she only gets as far as killing Beloved, as the men who have chased her into the barn are so shocked by the act of Sethe killing her child that they leave her alone. When Sethe is no longer cornered, she no longer finds it necessary to kill her children.  This is where the claim to "agency" gets really complicated for me in characters like Medea and Sethe. There is agency in the sense that a human being has been pushed into a corner and chooses an escape route that deviates from the normal... but does it still count as agency if the character themselves believes they have no other option under the circumstances?

 

However, to reenvision Medea as loving; to perform her with complexity, is to be magical. I think Jones understanding of Medea, and her entertwining of Medea’s story with the stories of women she works with, is an act of magic, because it reaches beyond conventional understanding and seeks to make connections in the lives of people.

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