Medea As A Barbarian
Medea As A Barbarian
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Assignment Question:- Critically comment on Euripides depiction of Medeas problems as relating to her status as a foreign woman in Athens.
Medea is a play about the subaltern, the Other, the misfit, the stranger, the woman who is deserted, a refugee, thought nothing of. It is a play about the barbarians powerful ability to restore her own dignity and achieve justice. Seen as such the play can function on a different level. It is a radical play because it uproots traditional beliefs related to gender, politics and culture which lay at the heart of Athenian society of the fifth century BC.
Athenians were vividly conscious that the establishment and growth of civilized values in a barbarous world lay with them alone as leaders of Hellenic culture. Athenians claimed to be the champions of the Greek way of life, its democratic ideals and firm opponents of barbarianism. They were extremely cautious of their superior achievements in art, architecture ant their naval and commercial supremacy.
This xenophobic attitude is most prominently evident in Jason, who used her for his own purpose. His mission to seek and bring home the treasure from the Barbarians can be seen as the ultimate symbol of the imperial dream which lasted throughout the centuries to the present day. On the one hand there is reference to the myth which has Medea hacking her own brother to pieces in order to assist Jason in his escape with the Golden Fleece from Colchis. On the other hand she shows her tenderness by cradling the body of the brother that she herself had slain. This unusual association places her and her brother together as victims of imperialism, facing Jason as the appropriator of the cultural heritage of Colchis and therefore the imperialist coloniser. Medea has served Jason in his quest for power, fame and posterity, in other words she has succumbed to the attractions of the culture of the coloniser and has betrayed her own native culture. She has lost the stature of a sorceress and a princess and misses her homeland. Medea: O my country! How bitterly now I remember you! (line328)
Medea's homeland is Colchis, an island in the Black Sea, which the Greeks considered the edge of the earth, a territory of barbarians (Bloom, 2002). She used her powers and influence to help Jason secure the Golden Fleece; then, having fallen in love with him, she fled her country and family to live with Jason in Iolcus, his own home. During the escape across the Mediterranean, she killed her brother and dumped him overboard, so that her pursuers would have to slow down and bury him. While in Iolcus, she again used her devilish cleverness to manipulate the daughters of the local king and rival, Pelias, into murdering their own father. Medea: I saved your life and every Greek knows I saved it... (line476) Despite all these sacrifices, she is betrayed by Jason, who decided to advance his station by remarrying the daughter of Creon, King of Corinth. Jason treats her like a barbarian woman, not as a wife. He is rather seems ashamed of marrying a Barbarian and Medea accepting it says the following statement: Medea: No, you thought it was not respectable as you got on in years to have a foreign wife.(line592) Medea is a very angry woman but the source of her anger is not simply Jason s marital infidelity. The playwright shifts the plays focus from Jasons betrayal on a personal level to Medeas recognition of her own betrayal of her cultural identity which begins with the murder of her own brother, and her subsequent yielding to Jason, the representative of the dominant culture and civilisation. Medea is angry at herself for being seduced by and surrendering to the hegemonic culture. Subsequently her revenge against Jason takes on the form of a rebellion against the imperial invader, and the killing of her children becomes an act of defiance against the invader and a rejection of the acquired culture. Though her rejection by Jason on a personal level is present as a catalyst, it is her oppression and the annihilation of her cultural identity which is identified as the major source of her anger. Indeed Jason is Euripides' ultimate portrait of the arrogant colonizer who embodies two related attitudes: metropolitan arrogance and a chauvinistic contempt, even fear of women. With an imperialists tone, Jason argues that Medea is remarkable in her ungratefulness for his having brought her to a civilized country: Firstly, instead of living among barbarians, You inhabit a Greek land and understand our ways, How to live by law instead of the sweet will of force. And all the Greeks considered you a clever woman. You were honored for it; while, if you were living at The ends of the earth, nobody would have heard of you. (Line536-41)
Of course the imperial-centered perspective is always that those Others live at the ends of the earth. Consistent with such views is also Jason's thoroughly contemptuous view of women: But you women have got into such a state of mind That, if your life at night is good, you think you have Everything; but, if in that quarter things go wrong, You will consider your best and truest interests Most hateful. It would have been better far for men To have got their children in some other way, and women Not to have existed. Then life would have been good. (lines 569-75)
Here Euripides directs his satire against Jason and the way he treats Medea, demonstrating how in the mind of the colonial imperialist the second sex and the second-class citizenship of the ethnic outsider easily fused into one. Therefore even in Euripides play Medeas acts are not primarily against Creon or Jason but against the larger ideas that they embody and the society that they represent. So she does not in essence kill her own sons, sons that belong to her, but Jasons sons. When he says having borne me sons, out of your lust and jealousy, you killed them (line1335-6), even Jason himself acknowledges that she killed his sons and not her own.
Medeas act of infanticide can be explored as an act of self-assertion and refusal to live in the limbo between her own cultural heritage and the dominant colonial power Jason represents. In the play, Medea chooses to break this binary division and carve her own path of survival, and thus her act constructs an expression of liberating heroic defiance and not of hotblooded revengefulness. As a result, her act of infanticide is not a monstrous unnatural deed but an act of protecting her children from suffering a fate similar to her own. Therefore her act of infanticide was an act of love for and protection of her children against the society which wronged and victimised her, based on her Otherness.
The Medea created by Euripides is not a woman who remains a victim of patriarchal, imperialist society. She shatters the confines of barbarian Otherness which that society had placed her in, and radically re-defines herself. Her act of infanticide acquires a socio-political significance. She sees her children as an expression of the corrupt society that has victimised her,
since they are products of her union with Jason who represents that society. Therefore in killing them she does not murder her own flesh and blood; instead, she strikes a blow against the system which has produced them and which they would help preserve if they remained alive.
Medea indicates that she is well aware of the fact that she doesnt belong, when she says that she is at the mercy of King Creon, who can grant [her] the right to live in Corinth or drive [her] out to other foreign shores. Medea, the problematic wife who is also a foreigner in the strict sense, embodies all the dangerous necessities and necessary dangers associated with otherness (Nimis, 412). Since she is a barbarian, she is considered to be dangerous and thus Creon sends her in exile. Creon: You are a clever woman, versed in evil arts, and are angry at having lost your husbands love. (lines285--286) and A sharp-tempered woman, or, for that matter, a man, is easier to deal with than the clever type who holds her tongue.(lines319--321) Therefore, before being conquered by the coloniser Jason, Medea did have an identity of a princess, which the forces of capitalist, imperialist society, as represented by Jason, have nullified. Consequently, Euripides depiction of Medea woman, wife, mother, and foreigner as a heroic figure who lives by the creed by which Homeric heroes lived and died, being dangerous to her enemies and helpful to her friends, must have surprised and shocked his audience beyond description. Her unexpected triumph at the end of the play is the triumph not merely of a woman wronged by her husband, but more significantly that of the ethnic Other, whom the hegemonic culture always sees as less intelligent, less logical, less civilised. In fact Euripides goes even further in challenging the traditional theatrical and social status quo when he lets Medea, unpunished and triumphant, leave Corinth born away by the chariot of the god Helios, in the form of a deus ex machina. Euripides quintessential tragedy of alterity is to give voice to the subaltern barbarian who is speaking and being heard loudly and clearly at the dawn of the third millennium.