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Analysis of Euripides’ Medea

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 13, 2020 • ( 0 )

When Medea, commonly regarded as Euripides’ masterpiece, was first per-formed at Athens’s Great Dionysia, Euripides was awarded the third (and last) prize, behind Sophocles and Euphorion. It is not difficult to understand why. Euripides violates its audience’s most cherished gender and moral illusions, while shocking with the unimaginable. Arguably for the first time in Western drama a woman fully commanded the stage from beginning to end, orchestrating the play’s terrifying actions. Defying accepted gender assumptions that prescribed passive and subordinate roles for women, Medea combines the steely determination and wrath of Achilles with the wiles of Odysseus. The first Athenian audience had never seen Medea’s like before, at least not in the heroic terms Euripides treats her. After Jason has cast off Medea—his wife, the mother of his children, and the woman who helped him to secure the Golden Fleece and eliminate the usurper of Jason’s throne at Iolcus—in order to marry the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, Medea responds to his betrayal by destroying all of Jason’s prospects as a husband, father, and presumptive heir to a powerful throne. She causes a horrible death of Jason’s intended, Glauce, and Creon, who tries in vain to save his daughter. Most shocking of all, and possibly Euripides’ singular innovation to the legend, Medea murders her two sons, allowing her vengeful passion to trump and cancel her maternal affections. Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s Oresteia conspires to murder her husband as well, but she is in turn executed by her son, Orestes, whose punishment is divinely and civilly sanctioned by the trilogy’s conclusion. Medea, by contrast, adds infanticide to her crimes but still escapes Jason’s vengeance or Corinthian justice on a flying chariot sent by the god Helios to assist her. Medea, triumphant after the carnage she has perpetrated, seemingly evades the moral consequences of her actions and is shown by Euripides apotheosized as a divinely sanctioned, supreme force. The play simultaneously and paradoxically presents Medea’s claim on the audience’s sympathy as a woman betrayed, as a victim of male oppression and her own divided nature, and as a monster and a warning. Medea frightens as a female violator and overreacher who lets her passion overthrow her reason, whose love is so massive and all-consuming that it is transformed into self-destructive and boundless hatred. It is little wonder that Euripides’ defiance of virtually every dramatic and gender assumption of his time caused his tragedy to fail with his first critics. The complexity and contradictions of Medea still resonate with audiences, while the play continues to unsettle and challenge. Medea, with literature’s most titanic female protagonist, remains one of drama’s most daring assaults on an audience’s moral sensibility and conception of the world.

Euripides is ancient Greek drama’s great iconoclast, the shatterer of consoling illusions. With Euripides, the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians of the fifth century b.c., Attic drama takes on a disturbingly recognizable modern tone. Regarded by Aristotle as “the most tragic of the poets,” Euripides provided deeply spiritual, moral, and psychological explorations of exceptional and domestic life at a time when Athenian confidence and certainty were moving toward breakup. Mirroring this gathering doubt and anxiety, Euripides reflects the various intellectual, cultural, and moral controversies of his day. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that the world after Athens’s golden age in the fifth century became Euripidean, as did the drama that responded to it. In several senses, therefore, it is Euripides whom Western drama can claim as its central progenitor.

Euripides wrote 92 plays, of which 18 have survived, by far the largest number of works by the great Greek playwrights and a testimony both to the accidents of literary survival and of his high regard by following generations. An iconoclast in his life and his art, Euripides set the prototype for the modern alienated artist in opposition. By contrast to Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides played no public role in the life of his times. An intellectual and artist who wrote in isolation (tradition says in a cave in his native Salamis), his plays won the first prize at Athens’s annual Great Dionysia only four times, and his critics, particularly Aristophanes, took on Euripides as a frequent tar-get. Aristophanes charged him with persuading his countrymen that the gods did not exist, with debunking the heroic, and with teaching moral degeneration that transformed Athenians into “marketplace loungers, tricksters, and scoundrels.” Euripides’ immense reputation and influence came for the most part only after his death, when the themes and innovations he pioneered were better appreciated and his plays eclipsed in popularity those of all of the other great Athenian playwrights.

Critic Eric Havelock has summarized the Euripidean dramatic revolution as “putting on stage rooms never seen before.” Instead of a palace’s throne room, Euripides takes his audience into the living room and presents the con-fl icts and crises of characters who resemble not the heroic paragons of Aeschylus and Sophocles but the audience themselves—mixed, fallible, contradictory, and vulnerable. As Aristophanes accurately points out, Euripides brought to the stage “familiar affairs” and “household things.” Euripides opened up drama for the exploration of central human and social questions embedded in ordinary life and human nature. The essential component of all Euripides’ plays is a challenging reexamination of orthodoxy and conventional beliefs. If the ways of humans are hard to fathom in Aeschylus and Sophocles, at least the design and purpose of the cosmos are assured, if not always accepted. For Euripides, the ability of the gods and the cosmos to provide certainty and order is as doubtful as an individual’s preference for the good. In Euripides’ cosmogony, the gods resemble those of Homer’s, full of pride, passion, vindictiveness, and irrational characteristics that pattern the world of humans. Divine will and order are most often in Euripides’ dramas replaced by a random fate, and the tragic hero is offered little consolation as the victim of forces that are beyond his or her control. Justice is shown as either illusory or a delusion, and the myths are brought down to the level of the familiar and the recognizable. Euripides has been described as drama’s first great realist, the playwright who relocated tragic action to everyday life and portrayed gods and heroes with recognizable human and psychological traits. Aristotle related in the Poetics that “Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.” Because Euripides’ characters offer us so many contrary aspects and are driven by both the rational and the irrational, the playwright earns the distinction of being considered the first great psychological artist in the modern sense, due to his awareness of the complex motives and ambiguities that make up human identity and determine behavior.

Tragedy: An Introduction

Euripides is also one of the first playwrights to feature heroic women at the center of the action. Medea dominates the stage as no woman character had ever done before. The play opens with Medea’s nurse confirming how much Medea is suffering from Jason’s betrayal and the tutor of Medea’s children revealing that Creon plans to banish Medea and her two sons from Corinth. Medea’s first words are an offstage scream and curse as she hears the news of Creon’s judgment. The Nurse’s sympathetic reaction to Medea’s misery sounds the play’s dominant theme of the danger of passion overwhelming reason, judgment, and balance, particularly in a woman like Medea, unschooled in suffering and used to commanding rather than being commanded. Better, says the Nurse, to have no part of greatness or glory: “The middle way, neither high nor low is best. . . . Good never comes from overreaching.” Medea then takes the stage to win the sympathy of the Chorus, made up of Corinthian women. Her opening speech has been described as one of literature’s earliest feminist manifestos, in which she declares, “Of all creatures on earth, we women are the most wretched,” and goes on to attack dowries that purchase husbands in exchange for giving men ownership of women’s bodies and fate, arranged marriages, and the double standard:

When a man grows tired of his wife and home, He is free to look about for someone new. We wives are forced to count on just one man. They say, we live safe at home while men go to battle. I’d rather stand three times in the front line than bear one child!

Medea wins the Chorus’s complicit silence on her intended intrigue to avenge herself on Jason and their initial sympathy as an aggrieved woman. She next confronts Creon to persuade him to postpone his banishment order for one day so she can arrange a destination and some support for her children. Medea’s servility and deference to Creon and the sentimental appeal she mounts on behalf of her children gain his concession. After he departs, Medea reveals her deception of and contempt for Creon, announcing that her vengeance plot now extends beyond Jason to include both Creon and his daughter.

There follows the first of three confrontational scenes between Medea and Jason, the dramatic core of the play. Euripides presents Jason as a selfsatisfied rationalist, smoothly and complacently justifying the violations of his love and obligation to Medea as sensible, accepted expedience. Jason asserts that his self-interest and ambition for wealth and power are superior claims over his affection, loyalty, and duty to the woman who has betrayed her parents, murdered her brother, exiled herself from her home, and conspired for his sake. Medea rages ineffectually in response, while attempting unsuccessfully to reach Jason’s heart and break through an egotism that shows him incapable of understanding or empathy. As critic G. Norwood has observed, “Jason is a superb study—a compound of brilliant manners, stupidity, and cynicism.” In the drama’s debate between Medea and Jason, the play brilliantly sets in conflict essential polarities in the human condition, between male/female, husband/wife, reason/passion, and head/heart.

Before the second round with Jason, Medea encounters Aegeus, king of Athens, who is in search of a cure for his childlessness. Medea agrees to use her powers as a sorceress to help him in exchange for refuge in Athens. Aristotle criticized this scene as extraneous, but a case can be made that Aegeus’s despair over his lack of children gives Medea the idea that Jason’s ultimate destruction would be to leave him similarly childless. The evolving scheme to eliminate Jason’s intended bride and offspring sets the context for Medea’s second meeting with Jason in which she feigns acquiescence to Jason’s decision and proposes that he should keep their children with him. Jason agrees to seek Glauce’s approval for Medea’s apparent selfsacrificing generosity, and the children depart with him, carrying a poisoned wedding gift to Glauce.

First using her children as an instrument of her revenge, Medea will next manage to convince herself in the internal struggle that leads to the play’s climax that her love for her children must give way to her vengeance, that maternal affection and reason are no match for her irrational hatred. After the Tutor returns with the children and a messenger reports the horrible deaths of Glauce and Creon, Medea resolves her conflict between her love for her children and her hatred for Jason in what scholar John Ferguson has called “possibly the finest speech in all Greek tragedy.” Medea concludes her self-assessment by stating, “I know the evil that I do, but my fury is stronger than my will. Passion is the curse of man.” It is the struggle within Medea’s soul, which Euripides so powerfully dramatizes, between her all-consuming vengeance and her reason and better nature that gives her villainy such tragic status. Her children’s offstage screams finally echo Medea’s own opening agony. On stage the Chorus tries to comprehend such an unnatural crime as matricide through precedent and concludes: “What can be strange or terrible after this?” Jason arrives too late to rescue his children from the “vile murderess,” only to find Medea beyond his reach in a chariot drawn by dragons with the lifeless bodies of his sons beside her. The roles of Jason and Medea from their first encounter are here dramatically reversed: Medea is now triumphant, refusing Jason any comfort or concession, and Jason ineffectually rages and curses the gods for his destruction, now feeling the pain of losing everything he most desired, as he had earlier inflicted on Medea. “Call me lioness or Scylla, as you will,” Medea calls down to Jason, “. . . as long as I have reached your vitals.”

Medea’s titanic passions have made her simultaneously subhuman in her pitiless cruelty and superhuman in her willful, limitless strength and determination. The final scene of her escape in her god-sent flying chariot, perhaps the most famous and controversial use of the deus ex machina in drama, ultimately makes a grand theatrical, psychological, and shattering ideological point. Medea has destroyed all in her path, including her human self, to satisfy her passion, becoming at the play’s end, neither a hero nor a villain but a fear-some force of nature: irrational, impersonal, destructive power that sweeps aside human aspirations, affections, and the consoling illusions of mercy and order in the universe.

Revision: Is Medea a hero or a villain?

One of your most important tasks is to work out of Medea is a heroine or tyrant and the tension between passion and reason.

Euripides suggests that Medea also has a legitimate grievance and so is not solely responsible for the tragedy. To the extent that Medea presents her grievances on behalf of “we women”, and to the extent that she criticises her unjust treatment, Euripides encourages the audience to sympathise with her desperate plight.
Euripides also suggests that she has been wilfully treated by Jason : in the 5 th century patriarchal society she has few rights as soon-to-be divorced woman and this adds to her grievances.
When the chorus describe her as a “child killer”, Euripides suggests that she has overstepped the boundaries of justice.
Euripides presents Jason as a cold-hearted husband who prides himself on being able to negotiate the tempestuous whims of others. Euripides suggests that one of his biggest errors of judgement is to misunderstand or downplay the depth of Medea’s passion and grievances. Accordingly, the playwright suggests that Jason is partly to blame and contributes to the tragedy. (Whilst he appears level-headed and “clever”, “superior” in his ability to think, he underestimates Medea’s capacity to dissemble.
Euripides shows the damage that can occur owing to extremes of emotion – both love and hatred. In particular, the playwright suggests that hatred festers and leads to shameful excuses on behalf of Medea who condones the suffering she inflicts on others. As the Nurse laments, tragedy arises from sorrow, which “is the real cause of deaths and disasters and families destroyed”.
Euripides also suggests that Jason’s phlegmatic and insensitive streak fails to anticipate the danger that lurks within. Only a very extreme action, it seems, can penetrate his barriers.

Views and values:

On the one hand, Medea is depicted as a heroic figure who passionately defends the rights of “we women”

Victim and passionate fight for justice: Medea fights against the injustice on behalf of all women, and from the outset, Lamentably, concedes that “there is no justice in the world’s censorious eyes.”.
Medea draws attention to the desperate fate of “we women” who are “the most wretched”. “When for the extravagant sum, we have bought a husband, we must then accept him as possessor of our body.”
Her passionate exclamations (“what misery. What wretchedness!”) and desperate questions (“Am I not wronged?”) to the Nurse and the tutor lay bare her incredible despair and anguish. ND. At first, the audience only hears Medea’s incredible anguish from the domestic space. However, she tries to temper and restrain her personal anguish and, as she enters the male public place, presents a logical and reasoned argument on behalf of “we women”.
ND As the “Women of Corinth”, Euripides depicts the chorus as a group of fair-minded representatives of the community who support Medea’s campaign for justice, and who, acting as one body, “suffer” with the “house” of Jason. “My own heart suffers too When Jason’s house is suffering”. They agree to abide by Medea’s pleas to “say nothing”, which makes them complicit.
Sacrifices: She has made significant sacrifices in helping Jason secure the Golden Fleece. The Golden Fleece also represents tradition and wealth, family and security. By helping Jason steal the Golden Fleece, Medea compromises her own family’s tradition and undermines family values.
Medea incited violence among family members and renounced her homeland. (She killed her brother and incited violence against Peleas. As the Nurse reminds us, in the prologue, “When Peleas’ daughters, at her instance, killed their father”.) “I was taken as plunder from a land”. She has no one “of my own blood to turn to in this extremity”.
ND The chorus also states, the life of a “stateless refugee”, which is “intolerable” and “desperate” is the “most pitiful of all griefs”. “Death is better.” “Of all pains and hardships none is worse Than to be deprived of your native land.”
Euripides ensures that the audience views Medea sympathetically. The chorus alludes to a new time when the “female sex is honoured”. Euripides suggests that the “male poets of past ages” who will “go out of fashion”; such poets “never bestowed the lyric inspiration/Through female understanding”.

Medea can be just as ruthless and manipulative as Jason. She deceives both Creon and Jason

The sharp-sighted Medea deceives both Jason and Creon’s family for her own purposes: “Do you think I would ever have fawned so on this man, except to gain my purpose, carry out my schemes?”.

Medea outwits King Creon and begs for an extra day, which enables her to fulfil her hideous scheme. (Later, she will extract a promise from Aegeus because of his desire for children.)
Medea appeals to Creon’s paternal feelings realising that homeland and children are critical to a man’s sense of self, his status and his vanity. Creon yields, although with considerable misgivings. He fears Medea and knows that she has considerable skills. (she can be clever and has significant “magic skills”)
Medea deceives Jason by acknowledging his desire for an obedient and repentant wife. Her false declaration of submission to Jason, her confession that she was a foolish emotional woman, lures him to his doom. “I talked things over with myself, she tells him, “and reproached myself bitterly”. “Why do I act like a mad woman? … What you did was best for me… I confess I was full of bad thoughts”. Medea knows that her best way to conceal her motives and implement her plan is to pretend to be submissive. It works. Jason is hoodwinked: he thinks that she has changed and become “sensible”, that is adopts Jason’s views and values.

MEDEA AS TYRANT PARAGRAPH

The chorus suggests that Medea crosses the line by killing her children and turns herself into a despicable “child-killer”. By killing the children, Medea’s righteous cause tips into cold-blooded revenge Euripides criticises her motives as she becomes obsessed with sparing herself the scorn of her enemies.

Likewise, her courage turns into stubborn ruthlessness.
Clearly, her ploy to use the children as tools in her revenge agenda is shameful and horrifying. She betrays her maternal instincts in order to hurt Jason in the most agonising way possible.
ND: During her two key soliloquies, during which she steels herself to commit the double murder, she reveals her personal struggle with her conscience. Euripides depicts her warring selves, as she consider the deed from the perspective of the third person: “Oh my heart, don’t don’t do it! Oh miserable heart. Let them be! Spare your children”.
Medea also reveals her acute awareness: “I understand/The Horror of what I am going to do; but anger/The spring of all life’s horror, masters my resolve”.
She seeks to justify her actions through recourse to her divine links but the audience must question whether she is simply trying to conceal or justify her heinous/hideous/shocking actions.
Already at the beginning of the play, E draws attention to her murderess acts that have been committed out of a sense of passion and love, fortune and fame. To this end, she exploits her children to harm Jason in the most agonising way possible, which in Greek society was through the children. “…” (aware that it will hurt both Jason and Creon at their most vulnerable)
She is dominated by a sense of honour and increasingly motivated by the need to spare herself the enemy’s scorn and derision. She fears, more than anything, the mockery of her enemies. “The laughter of my enemies I will not endure.”

Conflict: tension : between positive/negative passion (reason versus passion)

Literary devices: Medea is depicted as someone who is aware of the full horror of the deed. “ I understand the horror of what I am going to do.” (“I am well aware how terrible a crime I am about to commit but passion is master of my reason”) and this leads to a great deal of tension. During key soliloquys prior to the murder, Euripides depicts Medea’s agony as she contemplates the war caused by her love for her children and her resolve to murder her sons (the nurse says, “She hates her sons”) At one stage, Medea, as the motherly “I” considers the deed from the perspective of the third person and argues with the revengeful persona “you”: “Oh my heart, don’t don’t do it! Oh, miserable heart, Let them be! Spare your children! We’ll all live together, Safely in Athens; and they will make you happy … No.” (49-50)

She is desperate at the thought of killing her children (“My misery is my own heart, which will not relent All was for nothing – these years of rearing you – my aching weariness; my wild pains”) “Arm yourself, my heart: the thing That you must do is fearful, yet inevitable. Why wait then? My accursed hand, come take the sword; Take it and forward to your frontier of despair.” (55)

The emotional/irrational Jason : his problems

Euripides characterises Jason as a cold-hearted and condescending husband, who callously betrays Medea in order to gain royal favours. He consistently belittles and dismisses Medea’s grievances as a case of sexual jealousy. “My children; now out of mere sexual jealousy/You murder them”.

Jason overlooks the role that Medea played in helping him gain the Golden Fleece. He has the audacity to level at Medea the charge of traitor: “When I brought you from your palace in a land of savages into a Greek home – you, a living curse, already A traitor both to your father and your native land”, and conveniently overlooks the fact that she sacrificed her honour for his reward. He believes that he secured the Golden Fleece without her help.

He continues the patriarchal system that gives priority to male choices and behaviour. He later agrees that Glauce ought to listen to him: “If my wife values me at all she will yield to me (965/ 46). “If I count for anything in my wife’s eyes, she will prefer me to wealth, I have no doubt” (75)

Whereas the Nurse is sympathetic towards Medea because of her grief, Jason refers to “seamanship” imagery to suggest that he must navigate and weather Medea’s emotional storm. “I’ll furl all but an inch Of sail and ride it out.”

He unleashes insults at Medea and labels her the “polluted fiend, child-murderer”; “The curse of children’s blood be on you! Avenging justice blast your being!” He calls her a “Tuscan Scylla” “but more savage”. (58).

ALSO THINK ABOUT:

Divine links and support:

Medea seeks to present her scheme as one that has divine support, especially given the difficult task of securing the Golden Fleece for Jason. She defends her actions and her decision to kill the children on the grounds that she has God’s help and that “to such a life glory belongs”. “With God’s help I know will punish (Jason)”. (802- 42) She begs the Gods to help, “O Zeus O Justice” (767-40). She uses her magical skills to help solve Aegeus’ fertility problem and so arranges convenient exile. (She also later suggests, (1015/77 (1015/48). “the Gods and my own evil-hearted plots, have led to this”. (this is what the gods and I devised, I and my foolish heart”. Is this a selfish motive, or one that is selflessly protecting the honour of the Gods?

After her deed, Medea appears in the chariot “drawn by dragons, with the bodies of the two children beside her”. (58 – 1316) We learn that the “chariot moves out of sight” (1410, 60) as the chorus talks about the “unexpected” that “God makes possible”. Euripides does suggest that there is perhaps a divine element in Medea’s actions. Is there a higher cause, that is perhaps beyond human understanding? Or does he critique people’s all-too-quick tendency to find a scapegoat for our worst impulses?

The depth of Medea’s love is evident in the fact that she has sacrificed so much for Jason. The intertextual references to the Golden Fleece, impress upon the audience the sacrificial nature of Medea’s character and the depth of her passion for this Greek outsider who ventured to the “barbaric” lands to seek redress for his own family background … . She was “mad with love” for Jason. She has a very deep affection which is why she is so angry at his betrayal. She admits, too, that he would not have succeeded in gaining the Fleece without her support and magical skills. “it was I, Who killed it (the golden fleece) and so lit the torch of your success. I willingly deceived my father; left my home; With you I came to Iolcus by Mount Pelion, Showing much love and little wisdom. There I put King Pelias to the most horrible of deaths By his own daughter’s hands, and ruined his whole house.”

Extreme Passion

Medea is motivated by her excessive passion for her husband, Jason that turns to excessive hatred upon his betrayal. In many ways, these two emotions intertwine to give a complex portrayal of a woman who is deeply wounded because Jason believes that Glauce will become a more advantageous bride.

Furiously angry, and paralysed by grief, “(she lies collapsed in agony”), Medea commits the “hideous crime” against the royal house and gloats in both Creon’s and his daughter’s death, telling the Messenger, “you’ll give me double pleasure if their death was horrible”. Her “passionate indignation” at Jason’s betrayal leads to the double murder of her children as well, as she is determined to inflict the same amount of pain and grief upon her treacherous husband. She admits that she understands the “full horror” of what she is about to do , but concedes that “anger masters my resolve”. Euripides uses the mythological background of the golden fleece to highlight Medea’s former passion, the violence she has incited against her family, and her incredible sacrifice as she pursues Jason to Corinth to become the “stateless refugee”.

Euripides uses the mythological background of the golden fleece to draw attention to Medea’s strong passion for Jason, which leads to incredible sacrifice as she becomes the “stateless refugee”. Significantly, Euripides constructs the opening scene so that the audience can hear Medea’s wailing voice offstage, because of the news that he has chosen the “royal bed”. Euripides depicts Medea as the beleaguered heroine who is paralysed by grief (‘she lies collapsed in agony”) because of her loss.

She admits that understands the “full horror” of what she is about to do , but “anger masters my resolve” . The double tragedy confirms the Nurse’s warning right from the start, to “ “watch out for that savage nature…stubborn will and unforgiving nature” that seeks to inflict upon others the humiliation and anger she feels so deeply. In this regard, Euripides shows the damage that can occur owing to extremes of emotion – both love and hatred. In particular, the playwright suggests that hatred festers and leads to shameful excuses on behalf of Medea who condones the suffering she inflicts on others. As the Nurse laments, tragedy arises from sorrow, which “is the real cause of deaths and disasters and families destroyed”.

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Apr 5, 2021

Euripides' Medea: Tragic Heroine or Malignant Villain? - by Lucy Moore

Medea on her Golden Chariot – by Germán Hernández Amores

Euripides: Greek tragedian

King Aeetes of Colchis: Son of Helios, brother of Circe and Pasiphae

Jason: Greek mythological hero, leader of the Argonauts, husband to Medea

Golden Fleece: Golden wooled fleece belonging to the winged ram Chyrsomallos

Eponymous: Naming something after a person

Psychoanalytical: Investigating the interaction between consciousness and unconsciousness

Feminist Theory: Explanation of how gender systems work

Proto-feminist: The use of modern feminism when feminism as a concept was unknown

Euripides’ Greek tragedy ‘Medea’ was first composed in 431 BCE and explored the psyche and behaviours of Medea, the daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis and wife of Jason. The plot revolves around Medea’s descent into a complete rage infused revenge journey after her husband beds the Princess of Corinth. Her vengeance comes by murdering the princess and also the sons she shared with Jason. Euripides’ play has been dissected through many literary lenses throughout history: through the mediums of Psychoanalytical discovery, Feminist Theory and politics, just to name a few. Coming from a feminist point of view, the depiction of Medea can be seen on two polarising panels: on one side, she is a proto-feminist who is used to highlight the misogynistic attitudes of the contemporary periods and how women were simply restricted within their domestic sphere; however, on the other side she is the epitome of all that men feared that women could become: murderess, temptress and seductress. For many years the scholarly argument has raged whether Euripides’ intention was to portray his eponymous character as the ‘Tragic Heroine’ or the ‘Malignant Villain’ – was he trying to highlight societal and gender woes of the time, or was he simply a part of the patriarchal system that silenced the voices and freedom of women?

Medea’s main redemption as the tragic heroine is through the lens of feminism. Throughout the play, Medea defends her behaviour through her advocating for the rights of women as an extension of her own gender. Due to the patriarchal perspective of the period, women were seen as ‘mad’, with the idea that their womb would rage havoc around their body and would be tamed once they were impregnated – once again subconsciously highlighting the idea that a man was the only remedy to calm and tranquilise a woman. From the beginning of the tragedy, it is seen as one of Medea’s main motives to fight against the injustice women faced. When in public, to ensure she is listened to and respected, she restrains her temper and instead presents a logical and reasoned argument on behalf of women, as at the centre of Medea’s heart, she truly believes “there is no justice in the world for censorious eyes”. The idea of Medea as a tragic heroine through the lens of feminism would be an effective analysis from a modern-day point of view – perhaps Euripides did wish for the audience to sympathise and feel Medea’s pathos, or it could be his attempt to humanise the already demonised Medea to give her an arc, or simply to just make a mockery of Medea’s attempt to rationalise her fervent behaviour.

Medea’s relationship with her husband affects both her presentations as the tragic heroine and as the malignant villain. When Medea finds out about her husband’s disloyalty, her wails are heard offstage, which divides the attention between Medea’s heartbreak and Jason’s behaviour; full-fledged attention is not placed upon Medea’s outburst. On one hand, Euripides portrays Jason as a callous, cold-hearted husband but on the other, the playwright chastises Medea for her deception towards Jason. Throughout the play, Jason’s nature is unemotional but also manipulative: he finds pride in his tempestuous ploys but is naive enough to fail to recognise the deceit that is playing around him. Within the story of Medea and Jason, it is hard to dispute that Medea (in the beginning) did remain dedicated and loyal to her husband; she made significant sacrifices in regard to retaining the Golden Fleece and she undermines her own family values so Jason can fulfil his wish of wealth and security.

However, Euripides makes sure to remind the audience of Medea’s equal manipulative persona which leads her to the characterisation of the malignant villain. Medea is aware that Jason desires an obedient, calm, respectful wife to have as his trophy prize and therefore in order to conceal her plans, she pretends to be submissive which causes Jason to not suspect anything from her behaviour. Her main intention is to destroy Jason’s livelihood, which no longer consisted of her, just as he destroyed her trust and security and in the eyes of society, got off scot-free. Even though Medea’s deceit and manipulation are made explicit to the audience, it can be an honest revelation of how the suppression of female femineity within the domestic sphere can cause bubbling madness for an individual. Medea’s emotions are constantly suppressed by Jason’s dismissive nature towards her by labelling her grievances as sexual jealousy, and therefore she finds herself falling down into a gendered manmade rabbit hole of madness and tragic decline.

Medea’s own psychology and approach to the world around her is a monumental part of the weighing scales of her character trope. The only main indicator that Medea is aware of her destructive state is through her outwitting King Creon in order to accomplish her vengeance. Despite this, the rest of Medea’s psyche can be seen as her deterioration into madness. Her zealous exclamations to the Nurse and the Tutor, in particular, are key examples of the protagonist’s heartfelt despair and anger at her current situation – most predominately in a domestic space, as this is where women were confined to. It can be seen really that Euripides’ main intention is to show the psychological damage that extreme anguish and hatred can have upon someone’s behaviour and rational thought: the despondency paralyses Medea’s thought processes which leaves her causing and inflicting pain on others without realising it.

Overall, even though Euripides does attempt to portray Medea as the malignant villain, under all the layers, especially to a modern audience, she is truly the tragic heroine. The mental and domestic suppression Medea suffers at the hands of Jason and the patriarchal society causes her to spiral and become the villain the Greek audience would have deemed her as. But from a modern perspective, with a better understanding of sexist attitudes and misogynistic feelings, today’s audience can see that Medea truly is the tragic heroine and also, a victim of societal and domestic gendered abuse. A woman who held ascendancy as a princess became the archetype of evilness in female identity, when in fact, her nature and morality should have been seen as the product of her environment, not her own desired intentions.

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