Most people would define a great female protagonist as intelligent, strong minded and willing to fight for what she believes in. Both Bernarda Alba from Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba and Medea by Euripides fit this description. One is a tyrannical mother who imposes her choices on her five daughters, the other is arguably the strongest non-Olympian woman in all of Greek mythology. If we take a closer look, we notice that these two characters have many things in common. From their positions of strength, to the masculine aspects of their personalities; from the way they deal with situations to the part they play in the deaths of their children. In this essay we will attempt to seek out their similarities, as well as discover how two playwrights, who wrote for distinct audiences millennia apart, could have created two women so alike.
First it is important to place both ‘heroines’ in the setting where their tale unfolds. Bernarda Alba was created to be the allegorical form of Spanish dictator General Franco. Her control over her daughters is therefore very much like the right-wing military dictatorship that Franco had created in Spain. Medea was written centuries earlier, and set in the world of Greek mythology; the protagonist has just been abandoned by her husband Jason for Glauce, the Princess of Corinth. It is known that “most of Euripides’ thinkers are women”1, an apt description for Medea, who is very strong mentally and determined.
It would seem that these women are very different when its comes to the question of power. Bernarda Alba is immediately powerful in all aspects of the world that she lives in, and especially in her own household, “Tyrant over everyone around her”2. Medea, on the other hand, seems to be utterly powerless from the start: “But what of me? Abandoned, homeless, I am a cruel husband’s plaything”3, she is a foreigner in Corinth, she has burned all her bridges in her native land, her husband has left her, and she now has no protection in a land that is not her own. However, thanks to her single minded character she overcomes this ‘handicap’ and takes matters into her own hands: “The day on which I will make corpses of three of my enemies, father, daughter and husband-my husband.”4 This makes her unlike any other tragic hero in Greek mythology; another would have let this weakness take over their fate.
To begin comparing Euripides Medea and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 7, we need to look at three components: context, characters, and themes. Both Euripides and Ovid tell the story of Jason abandoning Medea for another woman; however, they do not always share a perspective on the female protagonist’s traits, behavior, and purpose. Euripides portrays a woman who reacts to discrimination by beginning a battle to gain revenge all who harmed her, which she is prepared to follow through with even if it means resorting to the most despicable methods. Ovid, on the other hand, tells of a much less severe figure whose modest goal is only to persuade Jason to return. Despite these written differences, both of their Medea’s create trouble by acting with emotions instead of with reason, and as a result, put themselves in undesirable situations. Euripides and Ovid present two different sets of motivations for Medea's behavior wh...
Over the course of time, the roles of men and women have changed dramatically. As women have increasingly gained more social recognition, they have also earned more significant roles in society. This change is clearly reflected in many works of literature, one of the most representative of which is Plautus's 191 B.C. drama Pseudolus, in which we meet the prostitute Phoenicium. Although the motivation behind nearly every action in the play, she is glimpsed only briefly, never speaks directly, and earns little respect from the male characters surrounding her, a situation that roughly parallels a woman's role in Roman society of that period. Women of the time, in other words, were to be seen and not heard. Their sole purpose was to please or to benefit men. As time passed, though, women earned more responsibility, allowing them to become stronger and hold more influence. The women who inspired Lope de Vega's early seventeenth-century drama Fuente Ovejuna, for instance, rose up against not only the male officials of their tiny village, but the cruel (male) dictator busy oppressing so much of Spain as a whole. The roles women play in literature have evolved correspondingly, and, by comparing The Epic of Gilgamesh, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Wife of Bath's Prologue, we can see that fictional women have just as increasingly as their real-word counterparts used gender differences as weapons against men.
Medea unlike the other two females was a murderer. She murdered her own brother, Jason's wife, Kreon, and her own children. She was also a sorcerer who used her power mostly for evil.
Medea is often very demanding in getting what it is that she wants; Antigone, will do what she need to do in order to get what she wants. With Antigone she is defies the law of a king to uphold the law of her spiritual belief. In the middle of the night she lives the house and sneaks into a field to bury her dead brother. Medea killed many people, including her own sons and a princess, in order to only spite her unlawful and cheating husband. The two women are like alligators, waiting motionless for the right time to strike. In the case of Medea, swift, violent strikes. And with Antigone, a cool collected precise one. These women are always determined to get what they want.
Ironically, Medea’s actions are similar to a man when she takes charge of her marriage, living situation, and family life when she devices a plan to engulf her husband with grief. With this in mind, Medea had accepts her place in a man’s world unti...
The story of Medea took place in Ancient Greek. At the time, people's lives, especially women's lives wore not worth very much. People with power can easily
Firstly, even though my thesis states that I support the argument that Alcestis and Medea represent contrasting ideas of a woman, I am not unaware of any similarities. In fact, I have noted a significant one, which comes to show that in the end, they’re just human. This is the two women’s love for their children. In Alcestis’ case, even though she has agreed to take her husband’s place as the one who is supposed to die, her last thoughts are for her children. It is evident that she wants to be assured of her children’s well-being when she implores Admetus to “[not] remarry [and to] spare them a stepmother, and inferior replacement, filled with spite and anger, who would raise her hand against [his] children and [her’s]” (Alcestis 324-7). This way, Alcestis wants to make sure that a potential stepmother doesn’t “ruin utterly [her] hopes of marriage (Alcestis 337)” speaking about her daughter, while she has no fear for her male child because he “has his father, a great tower of st...
Eupriedes, Medea and Sappho’s writing focus on women to expose the relationships between a variety of themes and the general ideal that women are property. The main characters in both pieces of literature demonstrate similar situations where love and sex result in a serious troll. These themes affected their relationship with themselves and others, as well as, incapability to make decisions which even today in society still affects humans. Headstrong actions made on their conquest for everlasting love connects to sacrifices they made to achieve their goal which ultimately ended in pain. Love and sex interferes with development of human emotions and character throughout the course
In the story of Medea, the author, Euripides, addresses the topics of foreignism and female roles in the ancient Greek society. In the play, Medea, a foreign born woman, marries Jason, a Greek man, and moves to Greece to be with him after leaving her homeland with death and devastation. Then, when their marriage fails, Medea lashes out against Jason, causing her own exile and murdering her children, to which she has no love connection, and Jason’s new wife in the process. The main character, Medea, confirms many of the alleged Greek prejudices against foreigners and creates some prejudices of her own in return. Medea’s foreign roots and misconceptions, as well as her familial and societal atrocities,
The tragic play Medea is a struggle between reason and violence. Medea is deliberately portrayed as not a ‘normal woman’, but excessive in her passions. Medea is a torment to herself and to others; that is why Euripides shows her blazing her way through life leaving wreckage behind her. Euripides has presented Medea as a figure previously thought of exclusively as a male- hero. Her balance of character is a combination of the outstanding qualities of Achilles and Odysseus.
... powerful, manipulative, and extremely smart, yet because she is a woman she has limited social power. She has no chance of being a hero because she acts out of hurt in her marriage and love turned to hate. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Agamemnon also kills his child, although it is not praised, he is still considered a hero after his death. Medea is portrayed as being a selfish and ruthless woman, making her unnatural. Nevertheless, the audience finds themselves uncomfortably admiring Medea and her strength as a woman. Medea’s madness portrays how one’s emotions can lead to detrimental results rather than using reason. She is driven by her desire for revenge and will stop at nothing to burn her husband Jason as he did her.
In Euripides' Medea, the main character of the same name is a controversial heroine. Medea takes whatever steps necessary to achieve what she believes is right and fair. She lived in a time when women were expected to sit in the shadows and take the hand that life dealt them without a blink of their eye. Medea took very radical steps to liberate herself and destroys the life of the man who ruined hers. She refused to accept the boundaries that a patriarchal society set upon her. Medea was a very wise and calculated woman who was brave enough to leave her homeland, along with everything she knew and loved, in order to follow her heart down the path of what she expected to be eternal happiness.
... ignores her domestic side and her internal suffering expressed by the Chorus and the Nurse, and instead she focuses on executing her revenge to heal her wounded pride. Hence, Medea’s focus on her dominance compensates for the two supporting characters’ favoritism to her motherly side.
Medea was a very diverse character who possesses several characteristics which were unlike the average woman during her time. As a result of these characteristics she was treated differently by members of the society. Media was a different woman for several reasons; she possessed super natural powers , she was manipulative, vindictive, and she was driven by revenge. The life that Medea lived and the situations she encountered, (one could say) were partly responsible for these characteristics and her actions.
In the plays Medea and Hippolytus, both by Euripides, the female psyche is a point of focus that is not explored in many other Greek tragedies. Through these plays, we can discover the way women were viewed in Ancient Greek society as well as their concerns. We can also pay attention to how women are portrayed differently between the two plays.In Medea and Hippolytus, the women we spend the most time with are Medea and Phaedra. These women have vastly different values, but the cunning and determination they use to get their ways are not as different as one may believe.