Revenge In Medea

MEDEA

Medea is a tragedy, written by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides in 431 BCE based on Jason and Medea, and particularly Medea’s revenge against Jason for betraying her with another woman. The play is set outside their house which represents the entire nation, Corinth, a Greek city. If the structure of the house is decentralized, so is the nation. In this play, revenge is a necessity and central to the play. Medea’s husband has not only wronged her by marrying the King of Corinth’s daughter but the King of Corinth banished her from the city to protect his daughter from Medea.

A common technique of Euripides is to use the opening speech to explain

Also she did not want to leave any possibility of revenge that the children could take on killing of their father’s wife. Medea’s actions are justified by her emotions as they are difficult thing to control at times. She is also raised in a different culture so she did not conform to the values of Corinth and did not easily accept that Jason married another woman. For the male audience, the evil deeds of Medea confirm their belief that women should be uneducated and kept at home. Medea was a divine character. She was the granddaughter of sun god, Zeus. She is not accountable for her actions if the Gods or Fates have influenced the course of her life and are acting through her. Medea desired the moderate life commended by the Gods. However, her husband did not have the same desires and chose to unfaithfully enter a relationship with another woman for political advantage. Medea was an instrument for executing a kind of divine or fated justice. Her behaviour could be seen as commendable because she was a character of action rather than a passive female character that would be owned and governed by a man. Medea goes as far to take the lives of her brother, father and her own children. Because Jason destroyed their marriage, Medea too, in a strange way destroyed the products of that marriage. In the end Medea is shown in a chariot drawn by dragons above sent by son god, in contrast Jason is shown sitting on the stairs mourning. This play has multiple endings. Euripides projected it objectively so that we understand Medea, but he left it to his audience to determine the