Medea
The audience first learns about Medea through the nurse and the tutor. We learn that she is struggling to come to terms with Jason’s betrayal. She wallows in despair; she appears intractable (stubborn) and implacable (cannot be appeased). She is capable of extreme emotions and is bitterly distraught. (The nurse mentions that Medea killed her father.)
Euripides constructs the beginning of the play in such a way that the audience hears, but does not see, Medea. Her voice wails from back stage, which tends to reinforce the nurse’s impression of Medea as a woman who has succumbed to the depths of despair.
The chorus also supports the portrayal of a woman shouting “shrill pitiful accusations”.
However, when Medea does appear, she phlegmatically (calmly and reasonably) justifies her sense of betrayal. Cleverly she universalises her case and presents her despair from the point of view of “we women”.
Her first criticism is that women are dependent upon the husband and she is treated as a tool of possession and has no rights. Even the Nurse draws attention previously to Medea’s exemplary role of service as an obedient woman.
At the end of the soliloquy, Medea personalises her problem from the perspective of someone who is extremely isolated. Her foreign-ness compounds her misery. She is isolated and has no family.
As a foreshadowing device, Euripides depicts Medea as a woman who draws attention to the bloody spirit of a woman who has been angered.
She is infuriated at her betrayal and at the fact that she sacrificed everything for Jason.
CREON
During her interchange with Creon, who fears Medea, she shows her skill at manipulation. She targets his compassionate side and sensitive, paternal side (“you are a father too”). Creon states that he fears Medea because she is a “skilled practitioner” and is capable of dangerous feats. More than anything, her foreignness and sense of difference make him uneasy.
JASON
Jason sees Medea as a women suffering from sexual jealousy. According to him, she suffers from ungovernable rage; she is intolerable and unreasonable because she does not realise the benefits to her and the sons of the marriage. He uses words to draw attention to Medea’s irrational and passionate outbursts, which do in part, reinforce the Nurse’s depiction of Medea at the beginning of the play. But whereas the Nurse is sympathetic towards Medea, Jason focuses on her passionate side to belittle her.
Euripides characterises Jason as cold-hearted (heartless, indifferent, detached, calculated and cool) and he patronises Medea as a foreigner of no worth. (She is “no woman, but a tiger”). The animal imagery recalls an irrational savage.
Jason uses “seamanship” imagery to suggest that he must navigate Medea’s emotional storm
He contemptuously, (scornfully, patronisingly, condescendingly) downplays/ belittles her role in his success and believes that she “got more than you gave”. He attributes his success to Aphrodite; this enables him to distance himself from her and to show that he was not dependent upon a woman for his victory.
MEDEA
Contrastingly, Medea focuses on her role, “I lit the torch of your success” and believes that Jason owes his loyalty to her and to the gods (esp Zeus). She places more weight on the “old order”.
(Medea – complicated character; makes adjustments; very skilful; Euripides builds sympathy for Medea and ensures that the audience never loses compassion for her.
Contrastingly, whilst Jason appears to be the victim of Medea’s wrath, the audience finds it difficult to sympathise with him and take his side.
Euripides suggests that Jason is in part to blame for his fate because of his coldness, his indifference and his harsh betrayal.
The playwright often portrays him as hypocritical – he defends justice but only as an abstract concept and acts unjustly to Medea.
Jason is more one-sided perhaps to reinforce Euripides’ criticism of the Hellas civilisation/order society.
Medea is a clever woman
In this regard, Medea’s clear-sighted rational insight into her predicament belies the Nurse’s depiction of a woman who is immobilised by grief. She appears strong, intelligent and clear-headed about her situation and her choices. For this reason, her actions cannot be excused or mitigated by any sense that she is confused or emotionally unstable. As Aristotle states, her deed were done “knowingly and wittingly”.
Medea and magic
Medea’s magical skills (“We were born women … in all kinds of evil skilled practitioners,”) enable her to blur the boundaries between the “civilised” and “uncivilised” worlds. Whilst a “foreign” trait, such access is also presented as a rare, ingenious and clever skills.
This skill also enables her to navigate the “new laws and “new customs”. (Medea concedes that a foreign woman, “needs the skill of magic to find out What her home could not teach her, how to treat a man”. (24)) Creon also concedes that she is a “clever woman, skilled in many evil acts”.
Accordingly, Medea’s access to magic enables her to play a dual role In this regard, whilst magic belongs to the realm of the other, it also consists of a certain skill and deftness that one attributes to the Grecian world of law and order.
The Chorus points out that “in fact women too have intelligence … not all of us, I admit; but a certain few you might perhaps find, in a large number of women – a few not capable of reflection”. Later, Aegeus greets Medea as an “old friend”, and tells her “a brain like yours is what is needed”.
Medea blurs the boundaries between justice and revenge
On the one hand, Medea presents a powerful case in defence of women and suggests that her grievances are fuelled by the injustices done to her, as a woman and as a foreigner. However, the means by which she seeks to redress these injustices undermine the righteousness of her cause.
Medea can be just as ruthless and manipulative as Jason. She deceives both Creon and Jason
The sharp-sighted Medea deceives both Jason and Creon’s family with a purpose: “Do you think I would ever have fawned so on this man, except to gain my purpose, carry out my schemes?”.
- She deceives Creon by recognising his soft heart. King Creon yields to her wish for “one more day” even though he knows he is making a mistake. (Later, she will extract a promise from Aegon because of his desire for children.)
- Medea appeals to Creon’s paternal feelings realising that homeland and children are critical to a man’s sense of self, his status and his vanity
- And indeed Medea outwits the King, begging for an extra day.
- Medea deceives Jason by acknowledging his desire for an obedient and repentant wife. Her false declaration of submission to Jason, her confession that she was a foolish emotional woman, lures him to his doom. “I talked things over with myself, she tells him, “and reproached myself bitterly”. “Why do I act like a mad woman? … What you did was best for me… I confess I was full of bad thoughts”. Medea knows that her best way to conceal her motives and implement her plan is to pretend to be submissive. It works. Jason is hoodwinked: he thinks that she has changed and become “sensible”, that is adopts Jason’s views and values.
- And we must also consider, why does Medea go so far?
We are struck by a singular cold-hearted streak in Jason, which Medea accurately recognises. “To me a wicked man who is also eloquent Seems the most guilty of them all.” In particular, he knows “he can dress up murder In handsome words”.
Phillip Vellacott notes in the introduction, “in the character of Jason a concern for civilised values is joined with a calculating coldness and an unscrupulous want of feeling.” He believes that one lesson of the play is that “civilised men ignore at their peril the world of instinct, emotion, and irrational experience”.
Medea abhors above all, Jason’s capacity for deception and his lack of honesty. “If you were honest, you ought first To have won me over, not got married behind my back” (34). And later, “a lying traitor’s gifts carry no luck”.
Whilst Medea has appealed to the “women of Corinth” on matters relating to the intolerable status of women, Jason seeks to narrow the debate and focus on her personal grievances and sexual jealousy. Even in his final comments, he, typically, continues to downplay the enormity of her pain: “You thought that reason enough to murder them, that I No longer slept with you” (59). As a result, he conveniently downplays her thirst for justice and condemns her as an evil “savage”:
“There is not one woman “In all Hellas” “who could have done it”.
When he says that he has brought Medea the boon of civilised “justice” the claim is further compromised by the fact that he has broken oaths made to the gods. As the chorus points out, “the grace of sworn oaths is gone/Honour remains no more/In the wide Greek world but is flown to the sky”).
The emotional/irrational Jason : his problems
He has the audacity to level at Medea the charge of traitor: “When I brought you from your palace in a land of savages into a Greek home – you, a living curse, already A traitor both to your father and your native land”, and conveniently overlooks the fact that she sacrificed her honour for his reward.
His diatribe, in which he unleashes insults and threats at Medea, is testament to this: “polluted fiend, child-murderer”; “The curse of children’s blood be on you! Avenging justice blast your being!” He marvels at his confounded choice of bride who has become a “Tuscan Scylla” “but more savage”. (58). He selfishly laments his own “childlessness”; which Medea concedes was not important to him prior to the murder.
MEDEA AND THE SOLILOQUY – THIRD PERSON
Some critics depict Medea as a Sophoclean hero, that is one whose determination and firmness of purpose do not waver. She refuses to succumb to the prevailing social order; she refuses to betray her own mission which is to wreak maximum emotional damage on her enemies. Poignantly, Medea understands the full extent of the horror and predicts a lifetime of despair.
Indeed, her attitude to the deed is uncompromising. “I must steel myself to it. What a coward I am, Even tempting my own resolution with soft talk”. The more she grasps the enormity of the deed, the more desperate she becomes and the more courage she must summon from within.
Her relationship with her sons is ambivalent, coloured as it is by her hatred towards Jason: “To see them is no pleasure to her”.
Reason and unbridled passion intermingle in violent ways. Eventually, Medea’s indignation will overcome her sympathy for her children. She admits, “anger masters my resolve”. (50)
Once again, she considers the deed from the perspective of the third person and views herself from a place without: “Oh my heart, don’t don’t do it! Oh, miserable heart, Let them be! Spare your children! We’ll all live together, Safely in Athens; and they will make you happy … No.” (49-50)
In this regard, Euripides sets up competing personas, the motherly “I” and the revengeful passion, the “you”, that compels the action and creates unresolvable tension. The dramatisation shows Medea’s most inner self, desperately opposed to “thymos” (passion) but resolved to its necessity. The calculated use of the pronouns suggests that Medea’s “I” is possessed by a violent other; a force that she seeks to quell. (“But the dramatisation succeeds also in showing finally Medea’s most inner self, her voice, desperately opposed to kardia and thymos” (Puttri, 140)
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