Euripides' Medea

Euripides? ?Medea,' was the first in a series of plays in which vivid, powerful women appeared on the Euripidean stage. It was produced in the year that the Peloponnesian War began, and sought to play on the low morale of the public to restore the female sex. Throughout the centuries it has been regarded as one of the most powerful of the Greek tragedies, and also one in which the theme of women was more important than most. It is in this play that Euripides could either rehabilitate or condemn the female populace.

Firstly we should make clear that the ?Medea? was a play, and although drama was frequently representative of everyday life and events, its characters were often larger than life, and portrayed to the extreme. Medea, therefore, was a representation of all the characteristics found in individual women put together. She embodied the passion, the jealousy, the hurt felt by betrayal, and the breakdown of her family, felt by any woman in a given situation. However, Euripides made the characteristics embodied by Medea in this play different, and made them hold a certain power and influence over the male characters. She exerted control over the childless Aegeus - who treated her very much as an equal - and she was able to use female charm to create an impact on Creon. She then manipulated them to her own benefit. If Euripides was trying to improve the treatment or status of women they he was going a very difficult way about it.

The traditional behaviour of women was a very important aspect of this play, and portraying Medea as both similar and different to fellow womankind allowed the audience to make judgement on the role of women as they knew it. Medea recurrently assaulted fundamental and sacred values and that gave the play much of its power and allowed Euripides to ?most persuasively portray her as an incarnation of disorder? . Could any male audience possibly start to respect any woman that could crush basic human order? Euripides did not himself condemn Medea, though, rather he gave the audience a choice on whether to accept her character and actions. However by implication he is associating a breakdown in human order as being due to the wickedness in such a woman. Yet associating such a drastic event with women would imply that they had the power to be so destructive, and that was not an option of the times - especially when a war had just broken out, and unity was of great importance.

Medea was no ordinary woman; she was a witch, from a homeland that was distant and mysterious. Yet we see that Euripides plays down her supernatural powers almost totally until the end of the play. He is trying not to portray Medea solely as a woman whose extreme passion will drive her beyond the limits of acceptable human behaviour, but also as a spokeswoman for the fears and pressures faced by ordinary fifth-century wives in Athens. Medea does, however, make the point of describing herself as an atypical Greek woman:

Let no one think of me as humble or weak or passive;
let them understand I am of a different kind

It is probably important to note that the Medea of earlier myth was as much a powerful sorceress as her paternal aunt Circe, and her very mortality was questionable. For Euripides to have almost ignored this fact, and to go on to stress to his audience that she is first and foremost a woman, is a brave move, and one that shows that he trying to call attention to the female cause.

Medea?s despair and humiliation over the end of her marriage would have been similar to that of ordinary Athenian women, yet unlike them she could not be returned to her father, or male guardian. She gave up her father?s protection with the murder of her brother and the betrayal of her family, and this is frequently pointed out. However, Euripides comments through Jason that as a foreigner she could easily have taken on the role of concubine, and have had her children provided for. Medea does not want to hold concubine status, though, and nor does she wish to live in solitude as Circe did. As a sorceress she would have had illimitable options open to her as to what to do, but as a wife she would have been bound by the constraints of Euripides? society. It is therefore obvious that Euripides? choice to portray Medea as a prisoner of society was purposeful, and that the purpose was to show the constraints placed on women in society, and the burden this places on them. Her opening speech contains a passionate account:

Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women are the most wretched...Still more, a foreign woman, coming among new laws, new customs, needs the skill of magic, to find out what her home could not teach her, how to treat the man whose bed she shares. And if in this exacting toil we are successful, and our husband does not struggle under the marriage yoke, our life is enviable. Otherwise, death is better.

Here Medea is portrayed as somewhat helpless, a pitiable woman tied to the constraints of her sex. Yet this is somewhat a facade, for she is most certainly not the innocent figure that she claims to be. She is frequently shown as a wicked woman, and at many points a male audience would probably have thought that such a woman should be ?thrashed, not listened to? . She murders four people within the play, and we know that they were certainly not the first. She was scheming and manipulative, and betrayed those who trusted her. Yet behind this frenzied, passionate witch was no doubt an ordinary woman pleading against the strict female life she abhorred. There seems to be a blatant contrast between Medea adopting the common woman?s plight, and her standard characterisation as an aggressive dangerous woman. From the beginning we sense that all is not as it seems.

Euripides has been labelled a misogynist for his treatment of Medea, yet surely that would mean portraying her as guilty, evil and wrong. He does none of this. Rather he remains indifferent to her behaviour - choosing to add so much sympathy to her plight that it would be difficult to despise her. He accentuates Medea?s moral and ethical weakness by showing her willingness to dupe both friend and foe alike; and he depicts her self-identification with all women as inappropriate as the play proceeds. There are also sinister hints that the seeds of Medea are within all women. The outcome of Medea?s case

'does not remove from Woman the evil fame she has traditionally won,
but carries it to it?s furthest potentiality? (E.McDermott p115) .

Even so, the pathos of her evocation of the helplessness of Athenian women among men does not fade, nor do the polemical tones of her cry that childbirth is as great a threat to life as battle:

I?d rather stand three times in the front line than bear one child

Euripides possibly understood the struggles of childbirth to have mentioned it in the same context as battle, for he felt passionately about the folly and ferocity of war. He empathised with this woman, and drew attention to this very female, and very alone, pain. Up until the point of her betrayal she had also been the ?good? wife, running the home, begetting male sons, and being obedient.

At the end Medea flies off in her magic chariot and she has clearly beaten Jason, but has the female sex been rehabilitated? The answer here is no, for the audience is drawn back at the end from attachment to either side. Both characters repel, and so both sexes are denounced. Inevitably, the audience would feel deceived by Medea who, by asserting her identity with everyday Athenian women and downplaying her supernatural qualities had manipulated them into false sympathy and empathy. They had gained an insight into womankind, only to be deceived. However, although the audience?s feelings for Medea may have changed, this does not render her comments on the sociological facts of womanhood any the less valid. Although the helpless plight cannot really be applied to her, she speaks words which would surely ring realistically and strike a mental response among an Athenian audience. Emily McDermott suggests that men and women would have had different responses to Medea?s deception, though. The female reaction would be one realising that Medea is not like other women, whereas the male would possibly see that women were not so different from her after all. However, this is not a satisfying conclusion when we consider that human empathy is hermaphroditic; it is not limited to those of the same sex.

What we learn most from the deception by Medea in this play is Euripides? fear of the capabilities of women, especially those confined to the roles society has enforced on them. There is a heightened sense that heavy societal restrictions laid upon women may potentially backfire, that ?the subsurface smouldering that they generate may burst out into the open in destructive flashes? . We can assume that Euripides was aware of such repercussions, especially as regards women, from his play on that theme, the Bacchae.

Yet, before Euripides? adaptation of this myth Medea was not portrayed as quite such a demonic character. It was the playwright himself who added the murder to the saga, possibly to fulfil the expectation of his male-dominated audience that women are nothing but trouble. Medea previously was known as a foreign princess who sacrificed her homeland and her family to save the man whom she had fallen so desperately in love with. She is seemingly respectable in one of Pindar?s Odes . Euripides, however, painted her as a clever foreign woman set against a warlike Greek hero whom he had ?turned into a stupid and calculating egotist? . He either despised the unethical character of Jason, or he genuinely admired the capabilities of women.

When Euripides portrays Medea wickedly, as he occasionally does, it is because he realises that her character could be in every woman. Yet he calls attention to her human aspect, and his sympathy for Medea lies in her frankness, directness and sense of outrage. Yet he must have questioned the truth and justice of Medea?s position and found its unfairness and slyness; regardless of it coming straight from the heart.

Medea?s murder of her two sons is an interesting problem if Euripides was trying to ?help? the female sex. The killing of children had been touched upon in other tragedies - notably Herakles and Bacchae - but in both of these cases the murderers had been previously turned mad by gods. The worst, strangest thing about Medea is that she was not mad . She makes crystal clear her intentions:

I will kill my sons.
No one shall take my children from me. When I have made
Jason?s whole house a shambles, I will leave Corinth
A murderess, flying from my darling children?s blood.
Yes, I can endure guilt, however horrible;

Medea is a murderess. She breaks all divine and social laws by the murder of her children. She commits the ultimate crime of passion, and is at once powerful and weak. Yet Medea was not some barbaric Greek war hero; she was a woman, far away from home, deserted, betrayed and condemned. Euripides was trying to show the position of women who were bound by society?s regulations; how their inner turmoil can lead to outer destruction.

In the Medea I believe that he fails to rehabilitate the female sex. He chooses a semi-divine, foreign sorceress to voice the appeals of ordinary Athenian wives. She is a woman capable of murder, manipulation and deception, and she has no sense of remorse. In choosing her Euripides appears to be sending out mixed signals concerning women. Her concerns are those that apply to the majority of women at the time, and an audience would no doubt have understood these; yet Medea deals with them in a way that is aborrant for a woman of fifth-century Athens. She invokes both pathos and disgust, and, for a male audience, she would encourage distrust and continuing ?imprisonment? for women. Although Euripides may well have believed in promoting womankind, it would have been difficult to put across to the male audience of the day, and that may be why he is unable to make any significant advances in the Medea.