Euripides, Medea

Euripides, Medea            Seminar Overview to GLS

Stephen introduced a bit of the background and context surrounding Medea during the seminar, and it is widely available elsewhere (i.e. Wikipedia), so I won’t go over it again here for the sake of brevity .

Medea is a mythological character and would have been well known to the Ancient Greeks. She is also the main character in Euripides play. In Euripides play, the action begins once in Corinth. Euripides chooses to present Jason, the great hero, as a bit of a dupe; and Medea had killed her brother Aspyrtus. Euripides major alteration is in adding Medea’s killing of her children. There are wide and varied opinions as to why he did this. Otherwise the play opens, as mentioned, once Jason and Medea are in Corinth and ends when she flees after killing Jason’s new bride, Glauce; her father, the king, Creon; and, both their children. She flies away in the dragon driven chariot sent by her grand-father.

My introduction to the class.

                This play is interesting in that, on the one hand, it is about very extreme actions and reaction combined with primal emotions culminating in enough blood and gore to keep even the most devote George Romero fans glued. On the other, because it has been told and re-told well into our own era and across multiple media’s: from theatre, to opera, to dance, to film; and, across a wide variety of cultures.

                The play touches of issues of revenge and vengeance, justice and oaths (taking, making, and breaking); the Other (foreignness, exoticism, gender, etc); all within the malleable mythological form. 

In Euripides day, the characters and the story would have been well known, so why Euripides chose to make such provocative changes is intriguing. For my part, and beyond the questions I sent around, I was interested not just in what was said, but what the characters—especially Jason—seemed to want left un-said.

This reminded me a bit of how Aristophanes chose to present the god, Dionysus, in his comedic play, The Frogs—where Euripides and Aeschylus must ‘prove’ which of them is the most worthy tragedian, with Dionysus as the judge. In his play, Dionysus is presented, granted more light-heartedly, weaker than we would traditionally see him. He is a bit of a buffoon, and it is his slave-servant, Xanthias, who is presented as strong, just, wise, and honourable.

At one point, Euripides is presenting his case as to why he should be considered the greatest of tragedians. He argues that it is because he is more democratic than Aristophanes, having given voice to the otherwise voiceless: slaves and women.

Dionysus responds: “Leave that issue alone, my friend. That is not a direction in which I would take the discussion if I were you.” 

Dionysus’ stated appeal is ironic. Things which are supposedly best left unsaid should be, well, unsaid—unless, of course, your purpose is to do the opposite and draw attention to it (irony). I am reminded of the concept of ‘ironic processing theory’, introduced by the linguist Geroge Lakoff, and popularized in the play/film, Six Degrees of Separation (also, more recenlty, in Inception). At one point in the play, the characters are talking about events in a day when one, Flan, turns to the audience and says: “It’s like when people say ‘Don’t think about elephants’ and all you can think about is elephants.”

This drew me back to Eurpides, Medea. At least twice, when Jason is attempting to rationalize his decision to marry Glauce to Medea, he starts a line of ‘reasoning’ only to prematurely end it with: “I do not propose to go into all of the rest of it.”

Absence denotes presence.

As stated, Euripides version differs at several points from traditional retellings. I think he does so to create a situation where we are at times attracted to the characters (both Jason and Medea) and then repelled by them (usually, they’re polarized from one another in this, too). In so doing Euripides moves Medea from a relatively two-dimensional character to an incredibly complex character; a Medea  we ‘love to hate’.

I also believe that Euripides is presenting Medea (and Jason) as mirrors upon which to reflect the underbelly of Greece; the un-spoken things that exist between the myth and the reality that is Greece. The hypocrisy and paradox where, on the one hand, all the high and lofty ideals that ring through Greece—of knowledge, of justice, of bravery, and fidelity—are shown to be, at least in part, a façade; while, on the other hand, illustrating that no matter how far Grecians attempt to distance themselves from the ‘barbarians’, their actions illustrate that this distance between the civilized and the barbarian is uncomfortably close—especially in the face of Medea, a ‘barbarian’, whose presence and demeanor challenge these notions.

Certainly Medea is ‘the other’, but we can also go one step further and see here as another half; perhaps of the whole. Here, I am reminded of Aristophanes (again!) in the Symposium when he presents the story of humans as once being whole (what we would see as two people in one: four legs and arms, and two faces), but split in two by Zeus’ thunder bolts as punishment.  Aristophanes reminds us “[e]ach of us when separated is but the indenture of a man, having one side only like a flat fish, and he is always looking for his other half”

When the Greeks (and when we) look at her we are confronted with those things we may not wish to see in ourselves: “there, but for the grace of God,” goes the saying. 

Or, perhaps a more fitting, but far less comforting, thought: “We have seen the enemy, and he is us…”

Her mere presence challenges some, and shatters other, stereotypical images and paradigms that some Greeks would hold: as a woman, she is independent; as a wife, she is strong; and before we can simply admire her: as a mother, she commits filicide.

Medea’s presence illustrates that the line between Grecian ‘civilization’ and the barbarian is a line neither fixed nor impermeable. Euripides presentation of her heralds another doppelgangerwho will challenge where evil rests: Jekyll and Hyde.

Just as Stevenson’s creature challenges the reader to wonder which is which (and who are we), Euripides Medea brings us—and probably his Grecian audience—very close to uncomfortable truths.

Some of the comments from the class.

                The questions sent around were not discussed directly, although I do think the sentiments of many of them came up, were mulled over, and out of this came some interesting observations and, of course, more questions!

• Considering the reality that it would be unlikely that Medea’s children would be left alive irrespective of Jason’s (naïve?) efforts, how do we/would we consider Medea’s filicide in light of:

o   Killing a wounded fellow soldier out of compassion in the face of an advancing enemy?

o   The case of Robert Latimer and mercy killing?

• How do we think about Medea’s filicide in light of similar events occurring even quite recently (and for very similar reasons)?

• What effect was Euripides trying to evoke in the audience (if any) in his presentation of Jason as conniving, or as naïve, or as an example of hubris? What about Jason’s breaking of oaths in a culture where oath are tantamount?

o   Think of Aegeus’ comments to Medea regarding Jason’s actions stating “[s]urely he would not dare to do a thing like that” and, shortly after this, holding that he “cannot approve of this” (both speaking to Jason’s decision to take Glauce as a wife).

o   Interestingly, Aegeus, although at first shocked by Medea’s request to take an oath to support his promise to help her, does so—perhaps Aegeus is meant to be a stand-in for the ‘Jason’ most of the audience would know (an, perhaps, expect). In this sense, Aegeus is an ironic foil to Jason.

• What can we say about Medea when we consider that she follows a similar pattern in regards to marrying Aegeus, then trying to kill his son, Theseus? Is it simply another case of murderous intent? Or, is it a case of survival and a representation of the common plight of women in this time?

• Are Medea’s actions a case of justice or of revenge? Where is the line between the two..?

• Given Medea’s heavenly blood-line, and the fact that she’s mythological, should we interpret her actions more literally or more figuratively and/or symbolically? What are the different ramifications of each interpretation upon the ‘message’?

• Is Euripides asking whether or not the gods are worthy of devotion given, on the one hand, how they play with humans; and, on the other, how, being immortal, morality may not even come into this

o   Here I was reminded of an episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the god-like creature known as Q. When Picard speaks to him of morals Q reminds him that morals are relevant only to creatures who are confined by mortality.

• In regards to ‘reason’: Medea certainly uses ‘reasons’ and ‘reasoning’. But she does so, more often than not, for ulterior ends. Jason, on the other hand, does more ‘rationalizing’ than ‘reasoning’. In the end, there appears to be little or no ‘critical reasoning’.

o   Interestingly, Jason in his attempts at compromise leaves himself compromised. He has, in this sense—wittingly or unwittingly—entered into a Faustian bargain;

o   Or, Proverbs: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before the fall” (16:18). In the Proverbs sense, we can see Medea’s manipulation as a case of saying what others want to hear.

• I also found a little bit of Jason in the character Mr. Incredible, from the modern Pixar film, The Incredibles Both are characters trying to reclaim the ‘glory days’ and rebuild their (self)importance. This is also apparent in Bruce Springsteen’s song, Glory Days:

o   “Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
a little of the glory of, well time slips away
and leaves you with nothing mister but
boring stories of glory days.”

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And then, one day, out of the blue while you're lolly-gagging about, a log falls on your head: end game. There's irony for ya!