Medea Dilemma Analysis

Ancient expectations for women include always putting the responsibilities of being a mother above all else, as shown in Euripides’ Medea and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, as well as Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. Both Clytemnestra and Medea exhibit motherly love and tend to those responsibilities, but commit atrocious, unladylike acts, which jeopardize the sympathy felt for them by an audience. The respective playwrights of each story use their character’s motivations and how they align with their roles as mothers first and women second to ultimately characterize each in either a negative or positive light. The motherly motivation that Clytemnestra and Medea exhibit excuses their vengeful and deceitful actions, however Medea’s final action,

Medea’s strength is portrayed as her madness as she takes control and decides the fate of her enemies. She is a strong character and Euripides allows Medea to have a voice by allowing the audience to witness her break from the norm of what a woman of her time is expected to do. After giving up her family and former life to be with her husband, Jason, he decides to marry a younger princess while still married to Medea. Medea realizes that women are left to face the most miserable situations and says, “We women are the most unfortunate creatures” (229). Jason feels that Medea is to be grateful for what he is doing by marrying into royalty as it will afford all of them a better life. The representation of Medea by Euripides is powerful, manipulative, and extremely smart, yet because she is a woman she has limited social power.

Euripides was interested in how culture affected things. He was not the typical writer and his characters confirm this. In Medea, Euripides wanted his characters to participate in a culture that was under extreme stress, perhaps the same stress that his culture was experiencing. He exhibited this by writing as if his characters were transplanted into a different culture, unique from their own, as if to use the unfamiliarity as psychological strain. Therefore the strain would immortalize or distort them. The way in which Medea meditates the murder of her children is much admired, however Euripides' interest is in the collapse or derangement of culture that makes the murder both possible and necessary (Arrowsmith 357).

In Euripedes’ play Medea, he depicts Medea as a woman who is consumed with vengeance and hatred after being betrayed by her husband Jason. This betrayal sparks a series of “unholy, horrible” murders. Medea’s actions can be justified through justice and revenge. Medea was motivated by Jason’s actions to pursue her own actions against Jason. Medea wanted revenge toward her husband for leaving her after she fully dedicated herself to Jason - and she also wanted to seek justice for the pain that he caused her. However, Medea went too far by killing her two children who were innocent in this matter. Ultimately, Medea’s final deeds are justifiable and outweigh Jason’s betrayal of his family.

Euripides also carefully reveals the elements of Medea's past that demonstrate her readiness to violate solidarity of family ties in order to pursue her intractable will; Jason and Medea's original tryst, for example, required that she kill her own brother, thus choosing marriage ties over blood ties. Secondly, Medea's selfishness provides power to her fatal flaw. Medea's selfishness and lack of humanity is displayed through the act of killing her own two sons. Medea understands that the slaying of her children will make Jason miserable. During this time, the chorus recognizes her self-worship and states, “But can you have the heart to kill your flesh and blood” (Euripides, The Medea, 816)? Medea does not stop to think what pain she may cause to herself by murdering them. She is only concerned about her happiness that will be derived from Jason's grieving. Medea comes to the conclusion that it is worth the suffering just to see her ex-husband unhappy. Medea states, “Yes, for this is the best way to wound my husband” (Euripides, The Medea, 817). This exhibits Medea's selfishness by the slaying of her sons just to cause sorrow to Jason for her own pleasure. Medea's rage also leads to her fatal flaw of excessive passion. Her excessive passion, fed by rage, leads Medea to do uncalled-for acts of violence and murder.

Medea is the tragic story of a woman desperate for revenge upon her husband, after he betrayed her for another woman’s bed. It was written by Euripides, a Greek playwright, in 431 B.C. Throughout the play each character shows us their inconsistent and contradicting personalities, in particular, Jason and Medea. The play opens with the Nurse expressing her anxiety about Jason betraying and leaving Medea for another, wealthier, woman. Our initial reaction is to feel empathetic towards Medea, who has been abandoned so conveniently. But towards the end of the play, when Medea takes revenge on

Euripides and Sophocles wrote powerful tragedies that remain influential to this day. The vast majority of work recovered from this time is by male authorship. What remains about women of this time is written through the lens of male authors’ perspective and beliefs about the role of women in Greek culture. The works of these two playwrights frequently characterize women as unstable and dangerous. Agave, Antigone, and Medea are all undoubtedly the driving force behind the tragic action in these plays. It is their choices that lead to the pain and death of the people around them. Through an examination of the evidence from three separate works, Antigone, The Bacchae, and The Medea, the role of women in ancient Greek tragedy becomes clear. The actions of Agave, Antigone, and Medea repeatedly prove their characters instability and danger.

Medea accomplished that by giving birth to two children for Jason. As the play slowly unraveled, it plainly displayed that she was faithful towards her husband, but being an ideal Greek wife was not her factual nature. She was independent and her qualities made her different from the Corinth women. In the opening sequence, the nurse introduced Medea as a frightening woman when someone wronged her. “Her temperaments are dangerous and will not tolerate bad treatment. For she is fearsome. No one who joins in conflict with her will celebrate an easy victory”, the nurse presented (page 2, line). From this, the reader can envision how ordinary other Greek women were. How they didn’t have a mind of their own and were defenseless towards those shabby treatments from men. These women were submissive and didn’t have any control over their lives. However, the protagonist Medea did. She took matters in her own hands when her husband betrayed her.

In ‘Medea’, Euripides shows Medea in a new light, as a scorned woman that the audience sympathises with to a certain extent, but also views as a monster due to her act of killing her own children. The protagonist of a tragedy, known as the Tragic Hero is supposed to have certain characteristics which cause the audience to sympathise with them and get emotionally involved with the plot. The two main characters, Medea and Jason, each have certain qualities of the Tragic Hero, but neither has them all. This makes them more like the common man that is neither completely good nor evil, but is caught in the middle and forced to make difficult decisions.

Euripides Medea is a play that largely embodies themes of sex and gender within Greek life, marriage and society. Lars Von Trier, Danish Screen writer, controversially took on and altered Euripides' classic Medea in the form of film. Although complex and compelling, Von Trier's film fails to capture major themes and qualities presented in the text version of the infamous Medea and relay them to an audience. Through the use of close reading and comparison, it can be proved that Lars Von Trier's film depiction of Euripides' Medea does not allow an audience to see the complexity and major themes of gender and masculinity that Euripides originally portrays to his audience, but rather depicts a story of lost love and femininity within the protagonist.

As a mother, Medea on the surface is not the best, as she eventually kills her children, ignoring their pleas for mercy ("Mother, don't kill us"). However, we must not ignore the heartache and pain that Medea endures in killing them. It takes incredible conviction to carry it out ("parted from you, my life will be all pain and

At first she decides to spare her children since she didn’t want to see them die and couldn’t bear the thought of having to kill them. A quote from Medea is “Oh my heart, don’t don’t do it! Oh miserable heart. Let them be. Spare your children!”(Euripides 49 1057-1058). What the previous quote is saying in Medea would like to spare her children from death since they didn’t do anything wrong. What it is also saying is that her heart is miserable most likely meaning that she is sad and depressed. When she says “spare your children” she is telling herself don’t kill your children they don’t deserve to have to die just because of what your husband has done to her. What that all proves is that she really did not want to have to kill her kids. Once King Creon and the princess pass she finally decides that she must kill her two sons. A quote from Medea supporting why she had to kill her children is “For they must die In any case; and since they must, then I who gave birth will kill them” (Euripides 55 1237-1239). What the quote is saying is no matter what her kids will die. What it is also saying is that she is going to kill them. When Medea says “I who gave birth to them will kill them” she is saying that since she gave birth to her sons she should be able to see them die. What all of that proves is even though she might not want to kill them they will die no matter what and she should be able to see them die which is why she kills them herself. What both of those quotes prove is even though she kills them it was necessary since they would kill them to punish them for the crimes against the king and princess that they helped commit even though they didn’t know it would kill the

The Chorus delivers these final lines of Euripides’s Medea, “…the end men look for cometh not, / And a path is there where no man thought; so hath it fallen here.” (Euripides, 80) This quotation not only signifies the events, which have transpired in the plot of Medea, it also shows the recognition of a very curious aspect of Medea: that the protagonist of the play, Medea, is not the tragic hero. A tragic hero by Aristotelian standards is one who possesses a driving aspect– or hamartia – which causes his or her downfall, who endures a reversal of fortunes leading to immense suffering – called peripeteia, and who undergoes an anagnorisis: a profound change or realization. Medea does not have any of these attributes. Instead, it is

Amongst Euripides' most famous plays, Medea went against the audience's expectations at his time. Indeed, the main character of the play is Medea, a strong independent female who neglected moral and . She was therefore in all ways different to how women were perceived in Ancient Greece. This essay will explore how Euripides' controversial characters demonstrate that his views were ahead of his time.

The poetic tone of Aristophanes' Lysistrata differs greatly from the poetic tone of the Greek tragedies we have read in class. However, after analyzing this Greek comedy, it seems to share some of the main characteristics of Euripides' Medea. Within these plays, we meet shrewd, powerful masculine women who use the art of manipulation to get what they want from others and to accomplish their goals. This theme of manipulation is employed through various means and techniques. The women of these plays also seem to contradict the stereotypical woman and have characteristics similar to the Homeric Greek warrior.