How does the play "Medea" impact the cause of women positively and negatively?
Medea helps the cause of women by showing that, even in a male-dominated society, where women have no rights whatsoever, a woman can still show the strength of character to take control of her destiny. Abandoned by Jason, and having left behind her own family, Medea is effectively a non-person,...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
a stateless refugee. As a woman without a family support network to fall back on, she's quite literally on her own.
This would be a huge challenge for anyone, let alone a woman living at a time when women were totally dependent on their male relatives. Yet Medea rises to the occasion, channeling her rage at Jason's betrayal into taking control of her life in a way that would be unthinkable for most of her female contemporaries.
However, the way that Medea chooses to do this is problematic, to say the least. This is because exercising control over her life revolves around causing death and suffering to others, most notably her own children. It says a lot about ancient Greek society that a woman can only act independently by engaging in such murderous acts. Medea's transgressions against society's norms may not exactly redound to her credit, but they don't say a lot for society either. In that sense, Medea's actions may undermine the cause of women, but they also lay the foundations for successive generations of women to take control of their lives, albeit without necessarily resorting to murderous violence and infanticide.
Is Medea in Euripides' Medea a positive or negative role model for female empowerment?
Medea, as portrayed by Euripides and other ancient authors, was not intended as a positive role model in any manner whatsoever, nor is she an example of female empowerment. If anything, she is precisely the reverse. Before the opening of the play, she sacrificed her brother and chopped up his corpse to delay her father in his pursuit of Jason. Murdering a brother and desecrating his corpse due to infatuation with a handsome foreign man is not the act of an empowered woman, but of a woman who defines her self worth in terms of romantic relationships, and has little in the way of an independence or ethics.
While she is quite legitimately angry at Jason for abandoning her, she does not kill Jason, but instead uses a poison to murder Jason's new wife, Glauce, an innocent young girl who is simply obeying the orders of her father. Medea's killing her own babies to hurt Jason, again, is not evidence of empowerment or independence, but of obsession with Jason. Rather than being a model of a strong independent woman, Medea seems rather unhealthily dependent on her relationship with Jason for her emotional state.