Hierarchical Gender Roles In Shakespeare's 'Medea'

INTRODUCTION

Medea was first performed in 431 BCE at the City Dionysia festival. Here every year three playwrights competed against each other, each writing a tetralogy of four tragedies and a satyr play (alongside Medea were Philoctetes, Dictys and the satyr play Theristai). In 431 BCE the competition was between Euphorion (the son of famed playwright Aeschylus, Sophocles (Euripides ' main rival) and Euripides. Euphorion won, and Euripides placed last.

The form of the play differs from many other Greek tragedies by its simplicity: All scenes involve only two actors, Medea and someone else. These encounters serve to highlight Medea 's skill and determination in manipulating powerful male figures to achieve her own ends. The play is also the

These stereotypes are derived from the binary opposition in the dominant gender ideology, which identified men as public, active, powerful, and dominant over women, who were considered intrinsically subordinate, domestic, passive, and powerless. This hierarchical gender ideology has been projected into the past to interpret all men’s activities and roles as powerful and high status, while devaluing women’s roles and activities as unimportant and low status. For instance, Kent points out that when hunter-gatherer women hunt, even with the same tools as men, it has been devalued as a type of female gathering, while men’s hunting role retains its pre-eminence. In this framework men’s views and behaviors are represented as the ungendered cultural norm or ideal, while women’s different views and behaviors are marginalized as gendered deviations from the norm. The case studies from the play show how deeply assumed gender stereotypes have pervasively shaped anthropological interpretations of other cultures and historic documents. However, the illustration below proves that the approach is true that Medea’s has the