Medea in the Greek Tradition - Assignment Example

Medea is said to be an offspring of King Aeetes of Colchis, the granddaughter of the sun god Helios, niece to Circe and later married to hero Jason with whom they had two children. The children were known as Mermeros and Pheres. In the play Euripides, Medea is left by Jason when Creon the king of Corinth bids him his daughter Glauce. The play particularly tells of Medea retaliating against the betrayal of her husband. This paper then discusses the character of Medea in Euripides tragedy as well as the attitudes of the audience towards the main character.
In this scenario, the character is defined as mental as well as ethical making it distinctive to an individual. In the Euripides tragedy, Dyson (p. 1) sees Medea as a protagonist and majestic as she was once sympathetic, daring, and morally offensive. This is because we see her being forcefully cast by the playwright in the mold of the tragic hero as the power of her anger as well as will stimulates approbation and wonder. As an outcast Dyson (p. 1) tell us that she further draws from the audience a natural sympathy. Again, we find that Medea was so violent. This is because she decided to kill her sons simply to gain revenge on their father. This should not have happened because as a mother, the children deserve parental love and therefore she should have not made the mistake of killing the sons (Dyson p. 5).
Bakogianni (p. 55) states that beyond contradictions such as the death of the sons of Medea, her moral confusion is very ironical of the fact that in her delusion, she feels that her gaps in normal human sensitivity towards the ones she loved which are particularly base. She however renews her criminal reappearance as a saneness or even proper conduct. Again, Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda (p. 41) add that the chorus seems to tell men to deal with women. Had men had the power to sing their songs, make their poetry, and choose their destinies, they would deal with the good, robust, and exemplary heroines. We also find that William Arrowsmith, just after admitting that Euripides criticizes the Attic society of his time, goes along to warn his audience against considering Euripides a feminist. She tries to beat men at their own game through warfare on one side and feeding the stereotype of women as intrinsically frail. She then shifts from one stereotype to the other and uses them to her advantage (Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda Pollock p. 40). Generally, Medea the great negator, murderess, annihilator, and above all the ultimate exile, is said to be the creator of the new order. Out of everything that happened around her, her human and female nature mutated and turned into an enormous accomplishment of most odious crimes, she is capable of reinstating her completeness.
The play here can be viewed as a feminist. This is because in no other play does Euripides portray a woman who completely undermines feminine norms and then overcomes masculine bonds. To be sure, Medea is not featured solely in Euripides. Still, being that his depiction of Medea was highly influential as well as replicated to some extent, the Medea viewed as a figure of feminine power in modernity is at least in part dependent on Euripides.
When the chorus first comes into the dialogue, Medea gets several cries from within the house. The cries are prudently crafted at the authorial level to reinforce the picture of Medea as an obedient wife emotionally distraught because she did everything to help her husband but was rejected. “Skillfully contrived is the choral passage in which we first hear the agonized voice of Medea. If we had been prepared to see a woman of a monstrous power as well as witchery, a being of preternatural desire and resource, we are cuckolded….The first cry from Medea, we should recall, is the longing to kill herself” (Musurillo p. 54). Her cry gives no plans, no invention against her Jason, no curses, or even any annoyance. Only her next outburst does contain curses against her husband.
Although to many modern critics, her last act may be seen as a justification of a woman wronged who has succeeded in absconding the masculine bonds, at the spectatorial level of the Athenian audience the killing of her children “supports the continued control of real women because it makes the freedom of Medea very frightening” (Rabinowitz, p. 150). It is hard to recognize, Medea as a feminine power standing for women's rights, nor the play as a work of proto-feminist literature. Euripides has long added male fear as well as anxiety in females but has not increased or inspired empathy for females.
After this presentation, the evidence for Euripides is anything but another masculine voice wanting to put females in their place all disappears. However, the play made males in the audience squirm as it was not his only desire to paint women as oppressed or even worthy of consideration. The outcome of the play would have as well encouraged high suspicion and scorn by males of females. Read More