Euripides, Euripides, Euripides, before I started reading your play Medea, I thought to myself, Yes! Finally a play that features a bad-to-the-bone female heroine. She's going to kick Jason's … !
Well, I have to say, after finishing play, I was slightly disappointed. There's no denying it: the play was intriguing and full of surprises (some violent and bloody, but still). I enjoyed the play as a whole but was disappointed by the way in which Euripides portrayed women. Had I no preconceived expectations, I wouldn't have been quite so put-off, but I expected Euripides to present women in a more positive light.
Ok, should we glorify a woman whose desire for revenge leads her to murder her children? Of course not. So in a way, Euripides does Medea justice. Via the Corinthian women, he expresses his agreement with her taking revenge on her husband for being disloyal and unfaithful but indicates his disagreement with her taking her hatred out on her children. He also points out that society characterizes intellectual women as crafty and ill-intentioned and highlights various struggles women face at the time.
However, his description of Kreon's daughter is just one example of Euripides sticking to societal standards and views of women. Kreon's daughter doesn't accept Medea's gifts to be gracious or kind or sympathetic to her hardships; no--she accepts the gifts because she is vain and seemingly materialistic. In a way, she represents the vanity of women and their blindness in the face of gifts.
My overall point is that although Euripides's Medea features a strong female figure, his views of women are by no means revolutionary or even feministic. I still really enjoyed Medea (it's one my favorite plays now!), but for different reasons.
5 comments:
I could not agree more with your analysis, Jessie. The very fact itself that the play features a female protagonist can trick readers into believing that the play does women justice. However, as you highlighted, it does the exact opposite. Some may argue that it paints women in a positive role in that Medea stands up to her husband when he cheats on her. If she had gone about her revenge in a more humane manner, I could agree with this argument. However, Medea murders four people to get back at Jason! That course of action paints women as psycho, not as strong! Additionally, the play makes women seem like hopeless romantics, given that Medea leaves her hometown to marry Jason after knowing him for such a short period of time. In my opinion, plays that hardly address women do less harm for females than this play does.
I agree with both of your assessments. In The Odyssey, Penelope (Odyssey’s wife) waits in Ithaca for years as Odysseus galavants around being a manly “hero.” Odysseus cheats on her many times, whereas Penelope remains faithful and tries to fight off the men attempting to take the throne in her husband’s absence. When Odysseus returns, she loves and supports him just as much as before (for the record, he does seem to “respect” her a bit more than Jason). Both women (Medea and Penelope) were cheated on, but they deal with it differently, and neither of their methods are good examples for women. Penelope just doesn’t address Odysseus’s abandonment, but Medea takes it too far and resorts to killing. In my opinion, Greek plays lacked a good middle ground on which women to base their marriages.
I agree that in the beginning, I thought Medea would be an empowered woman who would be a hero But culturally, the greeks treated women as next to nothing, as we saw during the women in ancient greece presentation, so in the end, Medea's portrayal did not surprise me. Multiple speeches in the play showed the outright sexism. Jason's condescending speech towards Medea made me want to hurt him! We also saw this at the end of Oedipus when Oedipus is saying goodbye to his daughters and told them they will amount to nothing because no man will ever want to marry them. Ladies, can you imagine having most of your life dictated by men and if you didn't get married you were basically nothing?
I do have to say.. when I first opened up Medea, I had a similar mindset as you: I was expecting the main character to be a sort of protagonist for readers to root for or a person that the audience is supposed to sympathize with. It seems that this is the way the playi is going af first since we discover in the very beginning how Jason cheated on Medea with another women. Instead, however, we find out that Medea is portrayed as an evil woman whose smarts drive her plans. How women were seen in the play is undoubtedly how they were treated in real life as well. A smart woman wasn’t seen good for society but quite the opposite because it was a threat to a world run by men. That’s where Medea comes in. She was a sorceress who knew how to manipulate people to get her own way. It was completely unacceptable for a woman to be like this. Yet, men could just cheat on their wives whenever they felt like it and it was completely okay. You also mention how the princess was seemingly materialistic. This I also agree with. It is no doubt that men believed that women only had one job: to look pretty and to never question men. Medea does the opposite of this and she is therefore a seemingly evil character, especially in the eyes of Euripides and The men of Ancient Greek.
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