Medea Essay

Throughout the entirety of the play, Medea, there are multiple victims of other people’s actions as well as their own. This raises the question: out of all the people who suffer in this classic play, ultimately, who is the tragic figure? Although many people have to suffer slow, painful deaths in the play, the answer is narrowed down to the two main survivors: Medea and Jason. While Jason is the victim of his children getting murdered by Medea, the tragic figure still remains Medea due to how she is the one who suffers the most throughout the play because of Jason and societal expectations.

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.

In Medea, Euripides uses irony to convey the fact that the female protagonist is strong in the androcentric society and the male protagonist is weak. In the article “Male Medea,” Nancy Rabinowitz describes the protagonist as “the transgressive woman, [or man] inside the woman's body, and her story gives the lie to the gender story--of the woman as victim” (16). Medea, the female protagonist, has the power to control and manipulate any character in the play. This is proven when the Tutor says “Madam, your sons do not have to go into exile; the royal bride gladly took the gifts in her hands; there’s peace now, with her and the children” (1001-3). This represents irony because the sons do not go into exile, but are instead killed by their masculine,

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).

The duty of women portrayed in Greek society is a major subject in Euripides Medea. In old Greek society, ladies are delicate and compliant as per men, and their social position is viewed as exceptionally mediocre. Feminism is the hypothesis of men being viewed different in contrast to women and the male predominance over ladies in the public eye. Women's lives are spoken to by the parts they either pick or have forced on them. This is obvious in the play Medea by Euripides through the characters of Medea and the medical attendant. During the day and age which Medea is set ladies have exceptionally restricted social power and no political power by any stretch of the imagination, despite the fact that a ladies' maternal and residential power was regarded in the protection of the home, "Our lives rely upon how his lordship feels." The constrained power these ladies were given is diverse to present day society yet parts are as yet forced on ladies to acclimate and be a devoted spouse. Ladies have dependably been dis engaged because of their sex in present day and antiquated circumstances alike. In Corinth they are required to run the family unit and fit in with social desires of an obedient spouse. Medea, being an eternal and relative from the divine beings has a specific power in insight and guileful keenness. Being an outsider, Medea's wayward nonsensical conduct was normal in this play as she was not conceived in Greece and was viewed as an exotic foreigner. She goes over to the group of onlookers as an intense female character regarding viciousness. Some of Medea's responses and decisions have all the earmarks of being made a huge deal about as creators for the most part influence characters to appear to be overwhelming; this makes a superior comprehension of the content and the issues which are produced through the characters. Medea's ill-conceived marriage and the double-crossing of Jason drive Medea to outrageous vengeance. Medea acts with her immortal self and confer coldhearted demonstrations of murder instead of legitimize the results of her actions. Medea see's this choice as her lone resort as she has been exiled and has no place to go, "stripped of her place." To make sensitivity for Medea, Euripides

Internal conflicts within Medea shed light on her true character and her difficulties to make decisions. Throughout the play, there are many cases of Medea contemplating her

Euripides was one of the most well-known playwrights of ancient Greece. He was known as a modern playwright because he wrote with realism, and had a doubtful way of portraying the gods in his plays. Euripides’s plays had women as the main character because he had a sympathetic way of portraying women. The women were mainly strong and are passionate in their motives for their actions. Although Euripides is well known now, during ancient Greece Euripides wasn’t an appreciated playwright. When there were play performances men would be the audience since women weren’t allowed to take part in or watch the plays. So with the focus of women in his plays, he gave them a voice, which would throw men off, mainly because they would be terrified if their wives did and said the same things. Euripides supplied a philosophical thought to the women he has written about.

The play Medea by Euripides challenges the dominant views of femininity in the patriarchal society of the Greeks. While pursuing her ambition Medea disregards many of the feminine stereotypes/ characteristics of the patriarchal Greek society. She questions the inequality of women in a patriarchal society, contradicts Jason?s chauvinist beliefs, challenges the stereotype that women are weak and passive and completely disregards the feminine role of motherhood. Feminism is the belief that women and men are, and have been, treated differently by society, and that women have frequently and systematically been unable to participate fully in all social arenas and institutions. This belief is confirmed in

Euripides created a two-headed character in this classical tragedy. Medea begins her marriage as the ideal loving wife who sacrificed much for her husband's safety. At the peak of the reading, she becomes a murderous villain that demands respect and even some sympathy. By the end, the husband and wife are left devoid of love and purpose as the tragedy closes.

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

For the women in ancient Greece, justice was far from reach. In the Greek society, men were allowed to abandon their wives in order to marry younger ones and Medea was not invulnerable to this fate. Despite all of her devoutness to her husband, he relinquished her for someone new. “Oh how unhappy I am, how wretched my sufferings. Oh woe is me. I wish I could die”, Medea cried out at the horrendous news (page 3, line 9). Euripides created a tragedy that many women during the ancient Greek time could relate to.

In Euripides' play the title role and focus of the play is the foreign witch Medea. Treated differently through the play by different people and at different times, she adapts and changes her character, finally triumphing over her hated husband Jason. She can feasibly be seen as a mortal woman, Aristotle's tragic hero figure and even as an exulted goddess.

Moreover, Euripides incorporates Medea into the relationship to convey the idea that females also possess power in an alliance, but the form of their authority is different compared to that of a male’s. Medea elucidates that even in arduous times, she assists Jason and supports their marriage. In a direct conversation with Jason, she tells him, “…after I’ve done all this to help you, you brute, you betray me…” (27). She explains that although she took care of Jason and supported him whenever he needed her help, he disabuses his power to overpower her and abandon her. Even after Jason abandons Medea, she thinks day and night of him. Medea demonstrates that the power females possess is not physical and totalitarian like the males, but rather is emotional and mental. She tries to keep the family together and in trying to do so, she does whatever Jason asks her to do. She is the important woman behind every successful man. Without her command, Jason would not be the person he is. Therefore, she can destroy Jason whenever she desires with her power. She can be a femme fatale and reduce Jason’s life to rubbles. Similarly, after Medea finds out that she is being cheated on, she quickly creates a malicious plan to obliterate Jason. She assassinates his new wife and his heirs. Although her love is “greater than

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.