COPING WITH ABANDONMENT

The paper will focus on comparison between the plays Medea by Euripides and By the Bog of
Cats by Marina Carr. By the Bog of Cats is presented as loosely based on Medea, but when studying
both texts deeper, it is evident that there are differences, which cannot be overlooked. Although the
base of the stories is similar, the main characters differ in some major aspects and therefore their
actions are not really the same. Lives of both Medea and Hester are marked with abandonment, but
each of them deals with it her own way – Medea by transforming her emotions into anger and desire
for revenge, while Hester by self-pity and suicide.
Medea was previously left by Jason, which is the main cause of her anger, shaping all her
future actions. She views it as a cruel betrayal, since she sacrificed everything for him and he still
ends up leaving her. As a result, all her love is replaced with anger and she wants him to pay for the
way he treated her.
Jason defends his decision to leave Medea and marry the king’s daughter by saying that he
did it “so we’d live well and not be poor” and that he wanted to “raise my sons in a style that fits my
family background” (p. 25). Even though there might have been various reasons, which led to his
choice, it is apparent that wealth and money played its role. Furthermore, he most likely wanted to
enrich mainly himself and uses his sons partly as an excuse. Thereby he only aggravates Medea’s
anger and confirms her final decision.
Despite being told to leave and start a new life, Medea cannot force herself to do it. Her
current home is the only thing she has left and while she might find a new house, it would not be a
home. In fact, she has nowhere else to go, as she betrayed her family for Jason, who has now
betrayed her. She refuses to feel even more abandoned, therefore she chooses to resist and starts
plotting against her traitor.
Full of anger, Medea does not hesitate and comes up with a plan, which would hurt Jason the
most and also send word to everyone not to play with her feelings. She aims to kill her children – the
cruellest thing she could have done – and is so blinded with her anger and desire for revenge she just
cannot let go of this plan.
The reason why Medea decides to kill her children is plainly expressed in the story – she
wants to get her revenge. That can be felt from every page and it shapes the whole course of the
story. Perhaps she would have decided otherwise, had she not been se permeated with anger; but
that is not the case. She chose to conceal her pain in anger, and revenge in form of killing her
children became her only hope to reach satisfaction – at least from her point of view.
Whereas Medea’s response to abandonment is plain anger and hatred, Hester’s reaction
could not have been more different. She is convinced that she and her husband Carthage belong
together and begs him to run away with her and their daughter. In fact, this leads Hester to some
desperate actions, which all suggest that she is not able to deal with being abandoned anymore –
one of those being showing up at Carthage’s wedding in her wedding dress. After she was left by her
mother, she spent all her life waiting for her to come back and perhaps became too emotionally
attached to people, who encountered and shaped her life – they played a role of her lifeline.
Therefore once she is forced to lose Carthage, possibly her greatest lifeline, she cannot accept it and
tries to find a way to make everything good again.
Similarly to Jason, Carthage leaves Hester primarily due to money, although he denies it. It
might be partly for Caroline’s money and wealth, but the main cause is the money he already got –
or, more accurately, the way he acquired it. Back in the past, Hester’s brother, Joseph, came to see
his sister for the first time. It was such a shock for Hester that she could not control her emotions and
eventually killed him. Carthage helped her get rid of the body, and with that, he took the money
Joseph carried with himself. Soon, his feelings of guilt become unbearable and he wants to start a
new life. Hester, on the other hand, perceives this incident as something that bonds them. Her
words: “Ya think you’re gettin’ away that asiy! Money won’t take that guilt away, Carthage, we’ll go
to our grave with it!” (p. 57) indicate that she is hurt even more by him denying his guilt and making
her the only one to be blamed, and overall, it contributes to her self-pity.
Like Medea, Hester refuses to leave her home. She has lived there her whole life and a single
idea of leaving this place for good has never even crossed her mind. It is primarily due to the fact that
she is still, after such a long time, waiting for her mother to come back. Her begging proofs that she
has never come to terms with being abandoned by her, and that it has affected her whole life: “I
can’t lave till me mother comes. ... Don’t make me lave this place or somethin’ terrible’ll happen.
Don’t.” (p. 57). She realizes she needs to cope with it somehow, but unlike Medea, she decides to
give in her feelings of abandonment, letting her mother’s choice to leave destroy her.
However, the path, which ended up with Hester killing her daughter Josie, was not at all as
premeditated as the one of Medea was. The whole time, Hester seems to be mainly confused by all
that is happening, and is only trying to find out what are her true feelings and how should she react
to them. While at the beginning of the story, all she does is blame others, moan over her fate and try
to persuade everyone – perhaps even herself – that she and Carthage are meant to be together, her
view somewhat changes throughout the story. Although these feelings do not go away, she realizes it
is of no help and as she declares war on Carthage at his wedding, she begins with her vicious acts,
which reflect her pain, feelings of abandonment and self-pity. Yet, it all happens quite immediately
after her realization and is neither planned beforehand nor premeditated. She burns her house – the
house she was supposed to leave for Carthage and Caroline – as a desperate act of revenge, to show
how hurt she is. The ultimate act of self-pity is her eventual suicide. It shows that she is tired of
waiting for someone who will never come and that she has decided not to fight anymore, but rather
to give up and stop feeling anything.
That being said, to kill Josie was never really Hester’s intention. Nevertheless, her actions
arise rather spontaneously and thus such thought does not come to her mind until the very end. She
has already decided to kill herself, to let go of her pain and be free. Yet once Josie appears and shows
her greatness of her love, something changes inside Hester. Perhaps she recognizes herself in Josie,
begging her mother not to leave, and so as she says “I want have ya as I was, waitin’ a lifetime for
somewan to return, because they don’t, Josie, they don’t.” (p. 74), she makes the ultimate choice. Her
choice is not to leave Josie to the same fate she was left to – she will not leave her at all. It can be
undoubtedly seen as cruel, but it has nothing to do with revenge. Judging from Hester’s words, to her
it is a proof of love, similar to what she wishes her mother would have done – to take her daughter
with her, wherever she goes.
Ultimately, it might seem as though fates of Medea and Hester are in fact rather unlike. The
comparison suggests that their coping mechanisms differ quite a lot, but there is something they
both have in common – the pain and fear of abandonment. Their final decision can be viewed as
cruel and inhuman, but those are nothing more than calls of desperate women, who were mistreated
and instead of getting help, they were hurt more and more, until they could not bear it anymore.
Therefore it would be highly unfair to judge their acts merely as morally wrong. It is crucial to
understand what they went through and why it forced them to act as they did – they simply needed
to finally find some kind of relief.