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The plight of women and the female discourse in the society of Euripides’ Medea

Article · May 2020

DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.12652859

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Anup Barua

Dr. AQMA Rahman Bhuiyan

English 522

18 May 2020

The plight of women and the female discourse in the society of Euripides’ Medea

Medea is one of the figures of Greek plays that refers most directly to the modern age.

Ancient Greek society was highly patriarchal and misogynistic. Their fathers governed Athenian

women after their birth, then they were ruled by their husbands after their marriage. The culture

expects the wives' full submission towards their husbands. Andrew Messing, in his paper “Proto

feminist or Misogynist?: Medea as a Case Study of Gendered Discourse in Euripidean Drama,”

proclaims that Euripides maximizes on the social concerns of all-male audiences around the

accreditation of women. Hence, Messing’s portrayal of Medea as a powerful female was a

dramatic move to exacerbate the conflict between her and male dominated Greek custom,

emphasizing only the ancient Greek view that “women must be controlled” (Hendrickson).

Medea is one of the earliest feminist characters in Western literature, which involves the

recognition of a significant cultural shift. Euripides' Medea indeed questions contemporary

beliefs and standards in ancient Greek society, substantially those of the heroic manly ethic.

Besides, there were some stereotypes of women in ancient Greek society. For instance, women

are emotional, irrational, oversexed creatures. Medea challenges Athenian society, which is a

man's world, where women are valued compared to the slaves except few powers on household

management. Medea is not a single woman here in the play; she is the collective mouthpiece of

all the Corinthian women. This paper thus proposes the depiction of the women situation in
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ancient Greek and how Medea, as a female protagonist, challenged the contemporary patriarchal

societal expectations in Medea.

Medea's speech to the women of Corinth is often mentioned as an anatomization of the

lives of women in ancient Greek society. The first feature of Euripides' play that is related to

seeing Medea as a classic woman is that, at the beginning of the drama, she is a woman deceived

by the man she thinks the world of, and for whom she has made substantial sacrifices (Africa).

When Medea first comes out from her house, Corinthian women already sympathize with her

because her husband has deserted her for princess Glauce. The text unmistakably brings out

questions regarding the standing of women in society. After all, Medea is the "quintessential

instance of a woman wronged (Hopman)." At the beginning of the play, Medea is inside her

residence, which is expected for Corinthian women. The Corinthian women or the chorus want

to ease the grief of her misery. When Medea speaks to them, she remains still and gives a logical

speech that mirrors not only her situation but the condition of women in general. She depicts the

inferior stand of women in society. Every woman has to give a fortune for a husband who

possesses her body. A woman has to modify herself according to her partner's expectancies.

Also, women have no alternative when he forsakes her. Medea is unique in this regard. She

strongly argues that the life of women needs more bravery than that of men. Medea's dialogue

expresses that she is not an irrational woman. When she emerges, Medea apologizes to all for not

appearing in the first place, and she speaks in such a way that is more suitable to a male, which

also challenges the male authority.

Besides, ancient Greek society was undoubtedly a males' world in which women were

expected to govern the house and to stay out of sight (Kramer and Austin). Most of the times,

marriages were fixed for political, economic, religious purposes, and hardly for love. For
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example, Jason's marriage to Creon's daughter is purely political, though Jason claims it as a

source of financial security. Husband and wife never got a chance to meet before their nuptials in

many cases. After the wedding, the women were chiefly limited to the wifely exercises of

controlling the servants, nurturing the children, and weaving on a loom. Medea's dissatisfaction

toward the social norms is exposed when she utters, "If a man grows tired of the company at

home, he can go out and find a cure for tediousness. We, wives, are forced to look to one man

only. And, they will tell us we at home live free from danger, they go out to battle: fools! I would

very much rather stand three times in the front line than bear one child (Euripides, et al. 2004)."

This line unquestionably the most notable feminist proclamation in ancient Greek literature.

Through the character Medea, Euripides loathed the arrogant exclusiveness of Greek

society and its people. Ancient Greek people, particularly Athenian people, were well known for

their haughtiness. In Medea, Jason incorporates the same quantity of arrogance. One can realize

the same complacent point of view when Jason tells Medea that he has done far more than she

did for him. Medea is treated as the 'other' here because she is not from the Greek land. She came

from a magical land named Colchis, where Jason went to snatch the Golden Fleece. However,

that is not a concern for the moment. The most crucial factor is the reply of Medea to Jason.

Because women had no power in ancient Greek society to speak up for themselves or raise their

voices, but Medea raises her voice to defend herself. She was the one who helped Jason to

acquire the Golden Fleece. In fact, Jason fainted away when Medea was killing the serpent,

which was guarding the Golden Fleece. She had shown the courage to kill her brother and leave

her homeland with a person she fell in love with. That was not expected for a woman in the

dominant male society to have such a quality to challenge the male authority.
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One of the stereotypes of Greek women is that women are not intelligent enough to cope

with their counterparts. Medea fell in love with Jason because he was a handsome young man

with an act of average courage, not because he was intelligent. Media is the granddaughter of

Helios, the sun god, which also makes her demigod. Also, she is a princess and possesses a great

deal of magical power. We can see Medea's rational power and intelligence in every dialogue of

her in the drama. Medea deals with King Creon to extend her stay for one more day, which

eventually brings catastrophe for Creon and his daughter. It shows her persuasive quality.

Another example is how she tricks Jason into believing her words.

In Medea, Euripides portrays women's power, which was certainly not present in

Athenian society. Women had no power to hold their husbands if they wanted to get remarried.

However, after losing her husband, paternal family, and at last her own house, she has nothing

left to do except taking revenge for her wounded pride. She makes a plot to kill Creon and her

daughter, later her own children. She shows the power of women in different dimensions. For

example, extreme love turns into extreme violence. Killing her children is a terrible task. Medea

kills her children because she promised herself that she would never be disgraced by Jason.

Medea is intelligent, witty, and charming in her own way, and top of all, she is suppressed. Her

violence is unspeakable, which cannot be controlled. As she is smart and intelligent, she is a

threat to the patriarchal society. For instance, Creon announces openly to Medea that he fears

Medea.

One of the essential traits of Euripides' play is that he made Medea reliable as a woman.

Euripides' Medea is not a woman of the fifth century but a mythological phenomenon of light of

modern 'inceptions of the female' (Kelly). She is not evil; instead, in the drama, she is portrayed

as a woman accepted as their peer by other women and supported by their solidarity with her
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cause. Even Jason's treatment of her, his deception, and his planning of her future without

consulting her, in keeping with the contempt for the female sex shown by him, mark her as an

ordinary woman. Medea knows the position of ordinary women. In this case, Medea challenges

the stereotypes of women, and she uses her feminine charisma to obtain consent from King

Aegeus for a place in his palace after she leaves Corinth, and again to persuade Jason that his

resolution to remarry no longer angers her and all that she wants is peace. This is prominently

evident in her famous 'Women of Corinth' speech.

Medea appears to be a character from the heroic past. In contrast, Jason seems to live in

contemporary Athens' world. Frankly, Jason's reasoning about having lawful successors and the

standing of his relation with Medea do not seem strange or irrational to the spectators. On the

other hand, the moan of Medea regarding the lives of women appears to be drawn from the

impressions of ancient Greek wives, while the issues of nationality and outlanders repeat those of

Athenian politics (Nimis and Nimis). Therefore, Medea, a spokesperson of the female as a

whole, who exceeds her role as a woman in part by taking on traits of the manly heroic code, was

being performed by a male performer in cross-dressed might have been a constituent in the

spectators' feedbacks to the portrayal of gender issues in the drama. The conflicts that arise from

the inescapability of women's presence in the city and the role of women in the reproduction of

its citizenry make up a standard tragic scenario. The Medea certainly centralizes this theme and

the various institutions that deal with it, so it will be convenient to give a brief survey of these

issues in the play.

In Medea, Euripides employs a narrative that occurs mainly round the intricacies of

Medea’s personality: her relation with Jason, intelligence, enchantment, social standing as a

foreigner, and her homicidal proneness. Medea is recognized as evidently other and non-identical
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through her kind of dress. Euripides portrays Medea’s exoticness through her corporeal

detachment from her motherland and the absence of progress. Since Medea is “cut off forever”

from her homeland, she begins to be an outsider during a renewal land without a residence to

return. Medea’s shattered antecedent leaves her entirely disentangled from her ménage and

motherland, which causes Medea’s cruelty, withdrawing the second time her bonds to the

household she created with Jason-“turning Medea into a fugitive who is vagrant without Jason

(Lauber). Through depicting Medea’s background story, remembering her ancestry, and

demonstrating how she reached to Corinth, Euripides implies to the spectators that this is often

the Medea of past, and thus the subsequent play centers on an identical thespian. Euripides

remembers her past while also pondering that past into this action of the drama.

In conclusion, the prevailing delight in Medea must be attributed to the fact that modem

critics, artists, readers, and viewers find that her narrative has a particular resonance with the

present world. Composing text regarding the ongoing exercise of contemporary writers to

contemplate their themes by way of Greek mythology, George Steiner observes that the enraged

wound of women pursues to discover voice via Medea (Africa). Medea, as a woman in Greek

society, is subjugated by social custom and tradition. Medea eventually becomes the tragic hero

through the amalgamation of her intelligence, charisma, intractable love, and reluctance to accept

her destiny as a woman quietly.

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Works cited

Hendrickson, Chloe. The “ Mad ” Woman in Medea and Decolonial Feminist Revisions : An

Intersectional Feminist Analysis of Three Plays. 2017.

Kramer, Christina Faye, and Stephen F. Austin. The Socially Deviant ( M ) Other in Euripides ’ "

Medea " and Two Modern Adaptations The Socially Deviant ( M ) Other in Euripides ’ "

Medea " and Two Modern Adaptations. no. M, 2018.

Lauber, Madison Skye. The Murdering Mother : The Making and Unmaking of Medea in Ancient

Greek Image and Text. 2018.

Africa, South. Author ( s ): Betine van Zyl Smit Published by : Classical Association of South

Africa Stable URL : Http://Www.Jstor.Org/Stable/24595328 to Acta Classica Betine van

Zyl Smit. Vol. 45, no. 2002, 2016, pp. 101–22.

Hopman, Marianne. Revenge and Mythopoiesis in Euripides ’ Medea Revenge and Mythopoiesis

in Euripides ’ Medea * Marianne Hopman. Vol. 138, no. 1, 2008, pp. 155–83.

Medea 1. 2011, pp. 1–25.

Nimis, Stephen A., and Stephen Nimis. Autochthony , Misogyny , and Harmony : Medea 824-45.

Vol. 40, no. 3, 2007, pp. 397–420.

Kelly, Adrian. “Medea.” The Brill Companion to Euripides,

www.academia.edu/16267683/Medea.

Euripides, et al. “Medea and Other Plays.” Amazon, Penguin, 2004, www.amazon.com/Medea-

other-plays-Penguin-classics/dp/B0007DPFAK.
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