Essay on The Evil Character Medea in Euripides' Medea

For Medea must fall in love with Jason and then she will use her great skill with magic to help Jason acquire the fleece. Because of Hera’s hatred towards Pelias Medea’s life is now destined for extreme agony, shame, and guilt. Her love for Jason causes her to tear away from her loving parents and dishonor her father by helping his enemy. Hera’s plan to avenge Pelias also flood Medea’s head with thoughts to keep her from straying from Hera’s plan. Unfortunately for Medea her decision to help Jason was not her own and was a careful thought out plan by Hera. Her life would never again be the same. Even though Jason promises to love her always and promises that she will be his wedded wife, he breaks this promise as soon as she become old and he is given the opportunity to marry royalty. Medea decisions were not in any way wise but if it were not for the arrows of Eros she would have had better judgment on the stranger. Medea’s behavior in this story shows that of loyalty and confusion in her heart. She is in agony because she can not conceive as to why she feels so much love for a stranger and does not wish to dishonor her father by doing so. But then she is constantly

The mistreatment that both receive from Jason and Agamemnon despite all that they do for them contributes heavily to their vengeful actions as well. Medea used her magical powers, defied her father, and killed her brother to devote herself to Jason, is still treated coldly and is neglected by Jason, who abandons her and their two sons and leaves her for Creon’s daughter. She realizes that “to annihilate the past is not possible: but its fruit in the present” can be used at her disposal to fulfill vengeance (Medea 1.364-5). She decides to channel the woe she

In Medea, a play by Euripides, Jason possesses many traits that lead to his downfall. After Medea assists Jason in his quest to get the Golden Fleece, killing her brother and disgracing her father and her native land in the process, Jason finds a new bride despite swearing an oath of fidelity to Medea. Medea is devastated when she finds out that Jason left her for another woman after two children and now wants to banish her. Medea plots revenge on Jason after he gives her one day to leave. Medea later acts peculiarly as a subservient woman to Jason who is oblivious to the evil that will be unleashed and lets the children remain in Corinth. The children later deliver a poisoned gown to Jason’s new bride that also kills the King of Corinth.

From the beginning of the play the conflict between good and bad where Medea and Jason are concerned has been ambiguous. Both characters have done terrible things in order to attain what they want. Nothing could stand in the way of them including Medea’s father, whom Medea betrayed and to pile on the grieve she kills her brother and drops parts of him into the sea so as to delay her father thereby ensuring that Jason and his Argonauts could fulfil their quest to attain the Golden Fleece. When Jason betrays Medea and walks away from their marriage we immediately identify him as the villain, yet the reader fails to understand that during that time when this play was written it was still socially acceptable for the man to walk away from his marriage provided he gives back the dowry he attained from the wife’s father. In this case Medea did not bring any such items so it was even easier for him to leave her so as to empower himself. It was Medea’s role as a woman belonging to that age to accept Jason’s decision however she feels betrayed that he would break a vow made in front of the gods, and apparently she was not a regular woman even by the standards of that time as she had an intellect that could rival that of scholarly men. So to exact her revenge she destroys everything Jason loves leaving him to regret ever betraying the marriage.

The story of Medea is about a woman named Medea who has just lost her husband, Jason, who went to go remarry with the king’s daughter. Medea gets furious and the king, Creon, banishes her from Corinth. Medea asks the king to give her one more day then she will leave. The king agrees. It is that day that she will plan on killing Jason, the king’s daughter, and the king himself. When she does this she will also get revenge by killing both her sins because they are the fruit of Jason and she will do anything to get revenge. That same day King Aegeus, king of Athens, arrives to Corinth and tells Medea that he will take her to Athens because she has medications for the Aegeus’ sterility. Now that she has somewhere to go she begins giving gifts to JAson and his bride which are a coronet and a dress which contain poison. After Jason’s wife dies her father , Creon, dies with her and Jason is left. Then Medea kills her two children and Jason is mad that he starts cursing Medea and she curses him back for remarrying. In the end Jason is devastated. In the end Jason wants to keep the bodies and bury them but Medea doesn’t agree and she

When Medea’s husband, Jason, plans to marry Glauce, a daughter of King Creon, for wealth and power over the kingdom, Medea becomes angry with Jason for breaking their vows of eternal love. She decides the best way to hurt Jason was by murdering his bride-to-be and their own two children.

Ever since she found out she had been betrayed by Jason, she has had “no pleasure left” in living. The only purpose left in her “cruel” and “accursed” life is to “strike dead” Jason, Creon and Glauce. Medea ends up killing Creon and his daughter but doesn’t make any attempt to kill Jason. To “perish his whole house” and “work revenge on Jason for his wrongs to [Medea]”, Medea plans to kill her two son as “it is the supreme way to hurt [her] husband”. Although Medea feels sad as shown by her “dewy eyes” and “these tears”, the audience are positioned to feel less sympathetic towards Medea due to her murderous actions towards her “own little

In the beginning on the play it was shown that Medea was so much hurt because of her husband’s second marriage that she wanted to kill her. She also begged to god to have a lightning to split her head but after thinking about the incident with all of her cleverness she thought it will not be worth dying, but making Jason and his newly wedded wife suffer will do her some justice and let her die in peace. She also wants Jason’s wife’s father Creon to suffer as he a banded her from her own country. She changed her plan of suicide to killing Jason’s wife so she can take revenge from both her husband and Jason’s father-in-law. She made a nice plan of giving a dress to newly wedded wife as a gift from her and also tell her to accept her children,

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

During Jason’s quest Medea aided him due to Aphrodite causing Medea to fall in love with Jason. After their return, Jason and Medea marry, with her giving him two children, and he becomes unfaithful to her. Medea is extremely hurt by Jason’s betrayal and the King, fearing her revenge, exiles her. Medea, after some pleading, is given one extra day before she is exiled which she plans to use to punish her husband. At this point, Medea plans to murder Creon, who is the King; Glauce, the King’s daughter and Jason’s new wife; and Jason.

Medea was married to the famous Greek hero, Jason, whom she left her homeland to live with. After bearing two children, Jason betrayed his vows to Medea, and married the princess of Corinth. In her grief, Medea plots to torture Jason and cause him as much pain as possible, even killing her own children to hurt him. The events that take place before the play serve to establish Medea as a heroine and victim. Medea is a hero when she kills her evil family to escape to Greece with Jason. She then becomes a victim when Jason betrays her for another woman. These events create empathy with the reader, and urge our support for Medea in her quest for revenge. Medea is established as an antagonist when she carries out her brutal plot to harm Jason, as described in the bulk of the play. Medea enacts a plot to kill the king and princess of Corinth, as well as her own children, as revenge for Jason. These actions are vengeful and merciless, causing the reader to despise Medea for her actions. The mixture of emotions surrounding Medea are the icon of the play, and leave the reader conflicted in opinion. This famous confliction of pity and fear towards Medea is a classic example of Greek tragedy.

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

It was very hard to be a women of the time Medea was written in. Women had to buy husbands and she alone has to make the marriage work or it is her fault the marriage falls apart. Men could leave their wives if they wished . Medea is set in a time that women were oppressed and had little to no rights. Medea did everything she did because She was mentally ill, very isolated and a single mother, but Jason as a man of that time did have a right to leave her.

Euripides Medea is characterised as a resilient protagonist who defied the odds of the unruly misogyny that was bestowed in the Greek society. She did not fit well among the Greek women in the play as she was a foreigner coming from an exotic land. Her role as a woman in the play were trampled upon. She had trouble adapting to the role of being a Corinthian woman. However, with this being forenamed, her determination and dominance caused people to fear her. She was independent and her qualities made her different from the others of that era. She carried some t traits though that had balanced within the society, modelling herself into a normal social Greek by giving birth to 2 children for Jason who she literally would do anything for as she