The Cause of Medea S Affliction in the Play by Euripides

Medea

Life was hard for women in Greece (or Corinth) as Medea notes in her 1st speech, when she calls upon the "white wolf of lightning to leap" and "burst" her and "cling to these breasts" like a baby. What is she saying? She wants to feed the wild forces of nature. This indicates that there is a great surge of power and rage in Medea -- and the reason, of course, is that her husband is casting her off. "Justice on earth is a name, not a fact," she says to the women who surround her. She has sacrificed all for Jason and now she is thrown aside as though she were worthless: this is the source of her complexity of feeling, which ranges from wrath to sorrow. From this speech, we can learn that life was not easy for women in Greece.

For foreigners it was no easier -- and this makes it doubly hard for Medea. When Creon comes in, following her speech, to announce that she is to be banished (for no good reason other than that Jason has decided to leave her), it is like rubbing salt in the wound. She left her home to go with Jason to his and yet he has kicked her out of his home so that he can start a new one with a new, fresh young-faced girl. For a foreigner in Greece, the world was not one's friend: it was a cold, inhumane world that placed all things Greek above all else, without regard for the thoughts or feelings of those whose ways were not Grecian ways. Being a foreigner, and thus despised by the Greeks (who do not like but their own -- which is why Jason wants to marry a Greek girl now that he is home), Medea has no hope for happiness as the one key to it in Greece has changed the locks.

It is difficult to view Jason as a hero after witnessing the grief that flows out of Medea. He may have acted heroically at points in the past, but there is nothing heroic about his abandonment of Medea -- and that is the point, of course. He is lured by the opportunity to marry a true Greek princess. His greed and ambition are motivating him, whereas Medea was motivated out of love. Now, that love turns into hate -- and Jason is the one upon whom it will be directed. It may be wild and barbaric what Medea does to extract her revenge -- yet in a way it is appropriate: it is the representation of what Jason has done to Medea, his actual wife, in rejecting her and ripping her out of his life.