Friday, September 30, 2011
Michael Gagarin on Medea
I found it interesting in the article, "Flow Backwards Sacred Rivers", that it seems that Euripides was following a pattern when it came to making the subordinate female into a dominant figure. Sophacles did it with Antigone, Aeschylus did it with Clytemnestra... Why did these poets have the desire to finally let the female character speak up? Was it a change in the culture? Did they finally realize that women were being oppressed?
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I think that poets were the "forward thinkers" of their day, so it doesn't surprise me that they were the ones to give women a voice. I think that the chorus in Medea was a very good example of this. It was made up of women (played by men of course) and people of that day would have agreed with the chorus. I think the fact that men of the greek culture would side with the chorus (women) is very important.
I like how Euripides changed the myth of jason to actually become a myth of medea. It showed that women can be strong and get what they want without having to fight in a battle. Although Medea was devious, I believe that she had every right to be angry at Jason. He treated her badly and then tried to say he was helping her by marrying a new bride. I feel like that showed a very large double standard, because women weren't even allowed to leave the house while men could go off and marry new women without any problems.
Its interesting that there are definite notes of feminism offset by the kind of villinization of Medea that comes from killing her children. Medea seems to be trying to break from societal bonds of femininity and the role of the "mother." Medea says women are supposed to be married (praying to God they marry a good man), never go to war, have children, and agree with their husbands. Medea frees herself from this convention but I'm not sure how the audience is supposed to react; her disparaging of the "role of women in society" leads her to a morally ambiguous "freedom." Even though Medea's frustrations are justified, her action is so extreme it incriminates her; in a way, she frees herself from oppression but at the same time wounds herself and tragically kills her own children. Medea, scorned by Jason's pigheadedness, rejects marriage and frees herself from societal boundaries. Medea HAD to kill her children to free herself from bonds of her sex completely. I wonder if the audience was supposed to pity Medea for the means by which she escaped or to praise her heroic breaking of societal bounds.
I definitely think that the verses by the chorus in which they defended women by saying that the story would be much different if they told the story is a very interesting one. One one hand Euripides could be ironic because the female chorus is played by all men, but then he could also be speaking his mind and had to seem ironic to please his audience. I believe that he was truly a feminist.
I think they where doing it for dramatic effect. Or, they are making fun of women indirectly. but maybe they where warning of the future if the oppression was kept up
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