Question

To what extent does Euripides’s play Medea provide the audience with the classical expectation of catharsis?

Accepted Answer

Medea doesn't provide the audience with catharsis in the classical Aristotelian sense of the purgation of the emotions of pity and fear, which remain even after the play is over. In Medea, Euripides evokes a different kind of catharsis to which Aristotle refers in Poetics as rhaumaston, which is the sense of wonder and awe that the audience experiences as the culmination of all the emotions they've felt throughout the play.

Answer

When a person watches a tragic play, the events of the play produce in that person a wide range of emotions, including happiness, pity, fear, sorrow, revulsion, and so on. In his Poetics, Aristotle defines catharsis as the release, cleansing, or purging of these emotions, particularly the emotions of pity and fear.

Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; ... through pity and fear, effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions. (Poetics, book 6)

In Medea, the action of the play elicits these same emotions, but catharsis isn't achieved in the conventional sense, because many of these emotions aren't purged and instead remain with the individual audience member long after the play is over.
During the course of the play, Medea does terrible things to avenge the wrongs that other characters in the play have done to her. She kills Jason's wife, Glauce, and Glauce's father, Creon in the most horrific way. Worst of all, however, is that she kills her own children to inflict devastating emotional pain on Jason, who abandoned Medea and the children to marry Glauce.
To the audience who watched the play when it was first performed in 431 BCE, Medea's killing of her own children was as shocking, unthinkable, and unforgivable as it is to a modern audience. The revulsion that the audience feels when Medea kills her children, and the sorrow and pity they feel for the children aren't cleansed from their minds when Medea flies off at the end of the play in the dragon-winged chariot with the bodies of her dead children. Those feelings are heightened by the realization that Medea suffers no consequences of her actions, and she feels no regret for what she's done.
There's another aspect of catharsis that Euripides evokes in Medea that Aristotle touches on only briefly in Poetics. After book 6, Aristotle replaces the term catharsis with the term rhaumaston, which means a sense of wonder and awe.

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident ...
The element of wonder is required in Tragedy. (Poetics, books 9 and 24)

To achieve her revenge on Jason for betraying her, Medea destroys everything that Jason loves, including their children. Even if an audience member believes that Medea was justified in committing all of these horrible things, and even if that audience member's pity and fear are purged [catharsis] by the ending of the play, that audience member nevertheless experiences awe and wonder at the way that Medea avenges the wrongs done against her.

Medea

To what extent does Euripides’s play Medea provide the audience with the classical expectation of catharsis?

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