In the story Medea by Euripides, Medea is betrayed by her husband Jason. In the course of their love Medea has gone to extremes in order to make her husband happy, yet he still decides to have an affair with the daughter of Creon, Glauce. In the process of her mourning, Medea becomes so overwhelmed with pain that she is unable to distinguish the difference between good and evil. She wished to equalize the pain she had felt when her husband had left her, so in order to do that Medea derived a devious plan that would ensure her husband’s long lasting desolation. Throughout the story Medea truly illustrates the full embodiment of the tragic vision of Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man”, Aristotle’s theory or Tragedy and serves as a medium for the suffering of others.
Medea lived an already chaotic life with her husband Jason, it was only further complicated when Jason decided to leave her. Medea was the type of woman that was willing to do anything to keep her husband, even going to the extreme of killing her own brother. So when her husband decided to leave her, her life went into a downward spiral of continuous destruction. There is an ominous foreshadowment in the beginning of the story. The reader is able to come to this conclusion due to the concerned natures of the elderly nurse and chorus. In fact, quickly after being banished from Corinth by Creon, she planned her revenge. This illustrated her, as Miller said a tragic character must be driven by “the wound of indignity.” She was driven by this inability “to remain passive in the face of what [she] conceives to be a challenge to [her] dignity.” Basically meaning that because Jason hurt not only hurt Medea emotionally but attacked her dignity, Medea would do whatever it takes to be able to retain what was left of her dignity. Medea would, at all costs, ensure the complete obliteration of Jason’s happiness. She was unwilling to take into account limitations for her revenge. She contributed not only to the suffering of herself but to multiple characters throughout the play.
Medea was a very unstable person after Jason’s betrayal. Her depression lead her to take rash decisions, she was unwilling to overlook her tragedy, she had a “tragic flaw” meaning that she felt it necessary to hurt her enemy, which was another example of Miller’s “Tragedy of a Common Man”. Her life was so over-consumed with the need to hurt her husband that she surpassed the realms of morality by first planning to kill Glauce, with a cleverly made poisonous robe. Her morality was further compromised when she decided to kill her own children, simply to prove to Jason what her pain was like. Not only had Medea inflicted a pain upon herself but pain was inflicted upon the father of Glauce, Creon. He wept and witnessed in agony the sight of his daughter dying from the poison that consumed her body, he tried to stop the poison but ended up also being consumed in it and died as well. After this portion of her plan had succeeded she killed her children because she knew that Jason would come looking for her after he had become aware of the news of Glauce’s death. Subsequently, Jason, when arrived at Medea’s place witnessed his children’s dead bodies which left him in complete anguish. Everywhere that Medea set her revenge upon caused the suffering of others.
Medea was willing to do anything , in order to ensure her appeasement. In general, Medea symbolized the strength of a woman, which played upon her image as a tragic hero. Aristotle referrers to the protagonist as acting in a self-destructive way due to the tragedy they endure, which causes blinding in their character. This is why; it could be concluded Medea was written up in such a specific way by Euripides. It is important to realize that the circumstances of her tragedy, especially being male inflicted, which caused her to fight against this common idea of a male dominated society. When faced with this incredibly unfair treatment, Medea responds with a shocking act of bloody resistance. By killing her children, she's rebelling against the submissive role of women in her time. Something to take into deep consideration is the fact that both children killed were males. Therefore not only is Medea hurting her husband but she intends to hurt the ego of thousands of other men, it is meant to leave a haunting message of what a women in capable of doing due to the agony a man has caused in her life, which again supports Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, through the “the law of probability or necessity.”
Medea was unable to control her pain and anger due to the fact her husband betrayed her. She planned to hurt the lives of those who had hurt hers. It is important to realize the severity of Medea’s pain; she was so overwhelmed with agony that she was willing to hurt anybody in order to succeed her revenge. She killed without moral restrictions; she killed Glauce to be which caused agony amongst her family and Jason. She then killed her sons that left Jason in ruins at the end of the play and leaves pain in the ego of male readers everywhere. The story successfully contributed to both Aristotle’s and Miller’s ideas of what a tragedy was composed of and Medea served as a very noteworthy instrument of suffering upon those around her due to her ravaging desire for revenge.
Works Cited
Aristotle. "Outline of Aristotle's Theory of Tragedy." Outline of Aristotle's Theory of Tragedy. Barbar F. Macmus, Nov. 1999. Web. 02 Nov. 2014.
Euripides, and Rex Warner. Medea. New York: Dover Publications, 1993. Print.
Miller, Arthur. "Tragedy and the Common Man." Books. The New York Times, 27 Feb. 1949. Web. 2 Nov. 2014.
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