Medea is today recognized, as Euripides’s the most
important play. It is a tragedy where the tragic protagonist is Medea, who is
not a Greek. Mostly, playwrights chose Greeks as their protagonists. However,
Euripides departs from convention and this becomes the major issue in the play.
Medea is a character that is unique, hard to find in any Greek literary
tradition. She is a strong, capable woman who refuses to take things lying
down. She is a woman of Amazonian stature and spirit. She is unlike any other Greek
woman. In Greek culture, women had very few rights. They were meant to do
housework and bear children. They were no better than slaves. However, Medea
comes from a distant land and therefore is not used to this shabby treatment of
women by men. Hence, she cannot tolerate Jason leaving her for another woman,
which was quite common and meekly accepted by Greek women. It wouldn’t be wrong
to describe Medea as a misfit in Greek society. Her personality is totally
different. Firstly she is a woman of knowledge, a clever and a wise woman.
Medea, herself in the play says so and the nurse too mentions it in her
expository speech. Medea also acknowledges the fact that it is her reputation
as a wise woman that makes people fear her. She says that ordinary people are
afraid of people of extraordinary learning, and if they are women then more so,
because women are always regarded as fools. People do not accept knowledgeable
women. This is one trait that makes Medea different from the Greeks. Secondly,
she is not a docile, submissive woman. She has a mind of her own. In
post-feminist context, this would be deemed as a positive trait in a woman, but
in ancient Greece, such women were seen with distrust. These qualities also
make her a frightening woman as the nurse says in the opening sequence. Medea
is an independent woman, who for the love of Jason, has tried to model herself
as an ideal Greek wife. Yet, that is not her true nature as the play reveals.
Passion is another one of Medea’s unusual traits. Medea is in Corinth because
she followed Jason out of Colchis. It was passion and love that motivated Medea
to help Jason. However, passion has a darker side too – possessiveness,
jealousy, the means by which love becomes hatred. Earlier too, passion was the
motivation for several terrible acts – betraying her country, impoverishing her
nation, killing her brother and turning king Pelias’s daughters into murderers.
So, her passion has a destructive side too. Medea’s ruthless, vengeful nature
stems from her passion. Her monstrosity is revealed in her plans to murder her
own sons. Such an act was huge, unprecedented act for a mother. Medea wavers a
little, but, in the end, it is her burning desire to ruin Jason that overwhelms
her. It seems her even the innocent cannot escape her wrath.
Kin killing was
quite common in Greek tragedies, but a mother killing her sons was
unprecedented. However, to say that she is a monstrous woman because of this
one act is too simplistic a view. One must understand her motivations. She
killed her sons because then the line of Jason would end and that was the
greatest punishment for any Greek. Secondly, she could not have left her sons
behind for Corinthians to mistreat them. However, this does not reduce the
cold-bloodedness of the murder. Medea’s different nature is also linked to
other themes of the play. One of the major themes is Medea’s foreignness and
the theme of the other. Exile was the worst kind of punishment for a Greek. To
wander without shelter or friends was considered a fate as horrible as death.
The play emphasizes this many times. Medea has nowhere to go, once Jason
abandons her. Since she is a foreigner to Corinth, she does not have the same
rights as everyone else. Her statelessness is emphasized again and again to
generate pathos. The other is also a key theme. The nurse, in the beginning
itself, reminds us that medea comes from adistant and exotic land. This
otherness is essential for self-definition. The Greeks ascribe certain traits
to ‘barbarians’. Jason says that he did a favour to Medea by bringing her to
Greece from a savage land where she knows what justice is. Even with all the
deriding of the other, it is quite essential for them as a component for the
adventure. Jason would not have been such a hero if he had not visited the
eastern land of Colchis. The chorus too underlines the fact of Medea’s
otherness and considers it a great bliss to live and die in the same place. All
this connects to the idea that Medea is a different woman, not only by nature,
but also by circumstances. She is not a weak character and Euripides shows
great craft in turning the monstrosity associated with her to her favour. Her
tragedy is one, that in the Greek society, many women had to suffer. It was
quite common for Greek men to abandon their wives and take younger ones.
However, one thing that is different is that Medea decides to hit back at Jason
for this injustice. She becomes the figure who avenges society’s excesses
against womankind.