Medea and Modern Child Abuse

Paper Summary:

This paper demonstrates that the natural order of life is for a parent to protect the child and that abuse of the child, including murder, is a reflection of an unstable mind and a person who is unable to function effectively within the community. Along with the example of Medea, the author brings some modern day examples of women that have killed there children, such as Susan Smith and Andrea Yates.

From the Paper:

"The killing of a child in real life has no symbolic meaning, no power other than that of an expression of evil and is, therefore, one of the worst acts a human, let alone a parent, can commit. In literature, however, the killing of children is symbolic of a diseased mind or of a diseased culture. Euripides' Medea kills her children, but she is a symbol of Mother Earth, of the Gods, and of nature all of which can exert, with no warning and no necessity of explanation, a death upon any or all of us. That which we are given can be taken away."

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