Medea The most obvious theme from Euripedes play Medea is that a woman scorned. Medea was happily married to her husband Jason while they raise their sons in Corinth. However Jason left Medea married the Princess, daughter of King Creon. To say this upset Medea would be a vast understatement. Medea’s true love abandon her and her sons. Medea knows that Jason no longer loves her and also believes he no longer loves his sons. This true love that she had for her husband now turns to hate. Jason gives her reasons for his actions but they certainly do not qualify as legitimate excuses. She tells Jason that he should have brought up his criticisms of her while they were still married. This is certainly something I have been through and how many others that have been in the same situation. This will turn out to be that enemy of lack of communication. Medea’s feeling of abandonment begins to grow and turns into hatred. This hatred calls for retribution on the husband that hurt her and her children so bad. Medea threatens Jason and his new bride and earns the wrath of Creon, the King. She makes excuses for her actions and begs the Cape to let her son stay in Corinth for one more day. And certainly we all make excuses in our life when we do things that are mean or even filled with hate.
After losing somebody close to me to a friend I too was filled with hatred and thoughts of revenge. Please crew over a period of time but finally died out. These thoughts are actually silly now when I look back on. However these feelings in Medea continue to grow. Soon Medea’s actual plans were to kill Jason, his bride and even her own sons. Her plans even evolve to include Aegus, a king who is having problems fathering children. Medea soon includes the unknowing king in her plans. This is something we all do also when we scheme and plan on retribution. Our involvement though often times help drag others down with
Later in the story, our sympathy transfers from Medea to Jason. Her revenge turns immoral, leaving readers with a sense of uneasiness. It is not so much the fact that she kills Creon and his daughter, but the fact that she slays her children in cold-blood.
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.
In Medea, a play by Euripides, Jason possesses many traits that lead to his downfall. After Medea assists Jason in his quest to get the Golden Fleece, killing her brother and disgracing her father and her native land in the process, Jason finds a new bride despite swearing an oath of fidelity to Medea. Medea is devastated when she finds out that Jason left her for another woman after two children and now wants to banish her. Medea plots revenge on Jason after he gives her one day to leave. Medea later acts peculiarly as a subservient woman to Jason who is oblivious to the evil that will be unleashed and lets the children remain in Corinth. The children later deliver a poisoned gown to Jason’s new bride that also kills the King of Corinth. Medea then kills the children. Later, she refuses to let Jason bury the bodies or say goodbye to the dead children he now loves so dearly. Jason is cursed with many catastrophic flaws that lead to his downfall and that of others around him.
Euripides shows his views on female power through Medea. As a writer of the marginalized in society, Medea is the prime example of minorities of the age. She is a single mother, with 2 illegitimate children, in a foreign place. Despite all these disadvantages, Medea is the cleverest character in the story. Medea is a warning to the consequences that follow when society underestimates the
Euripedes tugs and pulls at our emotions from every angle throughout The Medea. He compels us to feel sympathy for the characters abused by Medea, yet still feel sympathy for Medea as well. These conflicting feelings build a sense of confusion and anxiety about the unfolding plot. In the beginning, the Nurse reveals the recent background events that have caused Medea so much torment: "She herself helped Jason in every way" (13) and now he "has taken a royal wife to his bed" (18). Right away we are angry with Jason for breaking his wedding vows, and we are building up sympathy for Medea as the Nurse describes her acts of suffering. When we first see Medea, she speaks passionately to the women of Corinth and convinces them to side with her. She evokes their sympathy by drawing further attention to her suffering and speaking in terms that bring them all to common ground. Aegeus becomes Medea’s first victim when he, unknowingly, provides the final building block in her plan for revenge against Jason. We sympathize for Aegeus in his ignorance. Medea now has confidence in her plan, so she reveals it to the women of Corinth. She is going to send her children to Jason’s bride with a poisoned dress that will make her die in agony. We are still compelled to sympathize with Medea at this point because she has justified her reasons for seeking revenge. However, the princess is oblivious to Medea’s plot; she will accept the gift for its beauty then meet an unexpected, agonized death. The image of pain and agony elicits our sympathy as well. Medea presents her most perverse speech when she explains how she will kill her own children then flee Corinth. Alone, these acts provoke pure disgust, but Euripides has developed Medea’s character as a coercive force; we still sympathize with her for her plight, yet we also hate her for her decisions. The women of Corinth try to persuade her away from this morbid choice, but their arguments are ineffective. Euripides employs stichomythia in the exchange between the women and Medea to show Medea breaking down boundaries between self and other, which prevent sympathy (811-819). Euripedes focuses on suffering, ignorance, and rhetoric to leave us torn in our sympathy for every character.
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,
Medea is outraged that she sacrificed so much to help Jason, only to have him revoke his pledge to her for his own selfish gain. She asks him whether he thinks the gods whose names he swore by have ceased to rule, thereby allowing him to break his promise to her. Medea vows to avenge her suffering by destroying Jason's new family and his children. When Jason curses his wife for her murdering at the end of the play, she says to him, 'What heavenly power lends an ear / To a breaker of oaths, a deceiver?
In The Medea, Medea gives up her home, murdered her brother and tossed the pieces of his corpse and betrays her family to escape with her lover Jason. Against her father's wishes she helps Jason recover the Golden Fleece. Afterwards, Medea and Jason fall in love, get married and Medea gives birth and raises two sons. Unfortunately, Jason abandons Medea and marries King Creon's beautiful daughter. Medea alternates her role from a lover and partner in crime to an obsessive prideful monster. Me...
Medea and Lysistrata Medea and Lysistrata are two Greek literatures that depict the power which women are driven to achieve in an aim to defy gender inequality. In The Medea, Medea is battling against her husband Jason, whom she hates. On the other hand, in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the protagonist Lysistrata plotted to convince and organize the female gender to protest against the stubbornness of men. In terms of defining the purpose of these two literatures, it is apparent that Euripedes and Aristophanes created characters that demonstrate resistance against the domination of men in the society. Despite the contrast in the characters of Euripedes' Medea and Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the two playwrights depicted how gender inequality can start a fire.
Euripides created a two-headed character in this classical tragedy. Medea begins her marriage as the ideal loving wife who sacrificed much for her husband's safety. At the peak of the reading, she becomes a murderous villain that demands respect and even some sympathy. By the end, the husband and wife are left devoid of love and purpose as the tragedy closes.
When Jason left Medea to marry Glauce, Medea was plagued with sadness and then with anger. The man she loved, the man that she gave up her life for, had betrayed her. In the patriarchal society that Medea lived in, it was not acceptable for a woman to protest any decision made by her husband. Medea went against all social standards and took revenge on Jason for the wrongs that he had committed. She was willing to take any chance and sacrifice even her most valued possessions. Medea knew that the best way to avenge the wrongs of Jason was to kill Glauce and the children. It was a huge sacrifice for Medea to kill the children that she loved, but she allowed herself to look past that love and only see her hate and contempt for Jason. Medea was willing to go against every rule that society set, so that her husband wouldn't get away with leaving her for political reasons.
Medea’s illegitimate marriage and the betrayal of Jason drive Medea to extreme revenge. Medea chooses to act with her immortal self and commit inhumane acts of murder rather than rationalize the outcomes of her actions. Medea see’s this option as her only resort as she has been banished and has nowhere to go, “stripped of her place”. To create sympathy for Medea, Euripides plays down Medea’s supernatural powers until the end of the play. Throughout the play Medea represents all characteristics found in individual women put together, including; love, passion, betrayal and revenge. Medea’s portrayal of human flaws creates empathetic emotions from the audience. The audience commiserates with Medea’s human flaws as they recognize them in themselves. Medea plays the major role in this play as she demonstrates many behavioral and psychological patterns unlike any of the other Greek women in the play; this draws the audience’s attention to Medea for sympathy and respect.
This mutual suffering between Medea and the Chorus raises issues such as the treatment of women at the time when this play was written. When Medea married Jason, she married herself to him for life. She was expected to be totally obedient and to accept whatever her husband willed. For her to look upon another man other than her husband would have been totally unacceptable. Whereas Jason marries another woman while he...
Medea is a tragedy of a woman who feels that her husband has betrayed her with another woman and the jealousy that consumes her. She is the protagonist who arouses sympathy and admiration because of how her desperate situation is. I thought I was going to feel sorry for Medea, but that quickly changed as soon as I saw her true colors. I understand that her emotions were all over the place. First, she was angry, then cold and conniving. The lower she sinks the more terrible revenge she wants to reap on Jason.
When Medea Jason discovers Jason’s plans to marry Creon’s daughter she was hurt deeply. But when Creon tells her that she was being exiled we see her hurt turn into vengeance. Because Medea was a manipulative person she was only needed one day to plan and execute her plan to destroy Jason.