Saturday, October 3, 2015
So, what do you think?
Now that you've finished reading the play, what are your gut reactions to everything that has happened and how it has been concluded? Have your opinions of Medea changed? What about Jason? Any thoughts on which character would most accurately meet Aristotle's expectations of a tragic hero? No need to cite passages for this entry. Just speak freely and try engaging your classmates in your posts.
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ReplyDeleteBefore finishing the story, I thought that the unfolding of the events would be pretty straightforward but the story and my emotions were all over the place.
ReplyDeleteThe details about the princess’ and the king’s death were more gruesome than I expected them to be. For me, after hearing the story of their deaths, I was a little disappointed by Medea. I knew that she was going to turn out to be “evil” but Euripides makes it seem as though Medea lost all of her emotions and any possible feeling she could ever have. This made me unsympathetic for her, and even more so after she killed her sons. I did not expect the boys to have any dialogue, but hearing them for their few lines made me extremely sad. They didn’t have any say in the situation at all and were the victims of Medea’s rage. In addition, when Jason confronted Medea at the end, I was surprised that she confirmed Jason’s claim that she was only acting out because of sex. From the beginning it seemed as though she was angrier over the fact that Jason perjured his oaths but then it suddenly changed at the end.
By the end my sympathy moved a little bit towards Jason, but not completely. I still believe that what he did was very wrong and deserved to be punished but Medea crossed the line. I felt bad that he wasn’t even able to properly say goodbye to his two sons. To me it seems like Jason fits Aristotle’s definition of a tragic hero more than Medea. Even though Medea suffered throughout the play, Jason experienced major devastation all at one time and it was his flaw that caused this entire situation to enfold.
Overall, the ending showed me that Medea does not deserve to be pitied after all that she has done and that she really is badass.
I see where you are coming from Maya, and I definitely had a similar shift in sympathy towards Jason after the deaths. But, I don't see him as the one that was most negatively affected by Medea's actions.
ReplyDeleteI felt that the death of the princess was just for the situation—why not dish out some payback the man who left you? By taking away his new wife, Medea would leave Jason to suffer on his own and reflect on his choices. Additionally, the death of Creon, while it seems to work out well for Medea, was not planned. It could have been anyone who came to aid the princess in the moments before her death. I do not fully blame Medea for Creon’s death.
However, I felt that the death of her sons was overstepping the boundaries of the idea of revenge. Medea already inflicted the necessary pain on Jason, and her reasoning that ‘someone was going to kill her sons no matter what’ was insufficient. She could have easily taken the children somewhere far away, (like Athens!) where Jason would never have the chance to see them again and gave a similar feeling of loneliness and emptiness to Jason, but instead, by killing them, she simply inflicted more pain on herself.
And so, although Jason is greatly hurt by Medea’s actions, I see Medea as the tragic hero. Her plot to hurt Jason because of his betrayal became so crazy and out of control that she ended up further hurting herself than the one with which she sought revenge.
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ReplyDeleteI’m going to agree with Maya and say that Medea became harder to sympathize with at the end of the story and Jason became easier to. Medea repeatedly says that the boys were more hers than Jason’s. Because of this sentiment, that Medea decided to kill the boys is definitely more tragic, but also more irresponsible and, I hesitate to say this, illogical. At the point where she started to view her children as obstacles or weapons to hurt Jason, she ceased to be any kind of parent in my eyes. Furthermore, I think that Jason shows real remorse in seeing his children dead. He’s still a massive douche canoe, but a pitiable douche canoe, if only slightly. Mission accomplished, Medea.
ReplyDeleteJason repeatedly referring to Medea as a barbarian also somewhat irked me, if not for the blatant racism then for the stupidity it takes to insult the pissed sorceress with magic powers. Like, what did you expect? We talked in class about how Jason thought he had all the power in his relationship with Medea, and on some level he was right, but apparently not on all the levels he needed to get away with ditching a witch-wife. Seriously, there’s being wrong about your relationship with your wife, and then there’s a severe disconnect with reality about your relationship with your wife. I also agree with Maya in that Jason feels like more of a “tragic hero” than Medea does, for the mentioned reasons that his motivations *could* be construed as reasonable in his own view of the world, and that he fails because of a character flaw.
I agree with bits and pieces of what everyone before me has said. This last part of the play was very shocking and eye opening. I have to agree with Maya in it comes to the deaths that Medea causes. The description of the deaths or both the princess and Creon were outright gruesome. Just picturing the foam coming out of the princess’ mouth and her dripping flesh was very appalling and unsettling. The shouts from her children as she was attempting to kill them were also just completely sad and made me think that Medea had truly become a monster. Similar to the Chorus, I began to pity the princess and Creon because they were simply caught in a feud between Jason and Medea.
ReplyDeleteThe end of the play did make me question who the tragic hero was. The beginning of the play made me picture Medea as the tragic hero because she was betrayed by Jason (a man who she basically devoted her life to). The end of the play made me side with Jason more though. Medea not only killed the princess that he was going to marry, but also her father (Creon) and the two children. It is true that Jason is a horrible person because of what he did to Medea, but I feel that Medea is worst. Jason did not kill anyone, but Medea on the other hand killed a total of four people just to make Jason feel the pain that she felt. The interesting thing is that I see both Medea and Jason as the tragic heroes of the play. This is where I agree with Katie. In order to make Jason feel extreme pain, Medea had to also create extreme pain for herself in killing her children which was compounded upon her original pain from Jason’s betrayal. Both Jason and Medea are both tragic characters because of the pains that they had to face throughout the play, but I don’t think that either of them are pitiable because of some of their actions in the play.
I agree with Katie in that Creon and Jason were not the ultimate victims of Medea's actions. They deserved, to some extent, the pain they went through, because they were the ones who triggered Medea's emotional rage. Jason was not a tragic hero because his actions (of abandoning Medea) were with hurtful, if not malicious, intentions. Jason did not have a fatal flaw, and his ending was more of a consequence to his actions towards Medea. Creon, too, inflicted more pain upon Medea by taking the side of Jason and trying to exile her. If he saw into Medea's slyness, he should have also seen into her emotional vulnerability.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I was very thrown back by Medea's irony as she talks with Jason in the end about the death of the children. If Medea thought that the children's death will cause the most misery/loneliness to Jason, then why did she also say that she loved the children more than Jason? It did not make sense at all; she would have thought more about the children rather than hurting Jason if she had truly loved the children more than Jason did. What I think Medea was doing was trying to justify her rage upon the children by using Jason as an excuse. I am very curious about the after-story, how Medea would feel towards her children after the rage has gone down.
I don’t really agree with Katie’s point about Medea’s killing her son’s being overstepping the boundaries of the idea of revenge.
ReplyDeleteThough in the second to last page, Medea tells Jason that the reason she killed their boys was “for [Jason], to torture [Jason] in pain,” I think her actual reason to kill her boys is to save them the pain of becoming and being exiles. She made it very clear in the past few pages that her boys will have no home after she kills the princess, because her boys’ home, Corinth, will no longer be a safe place for them to say. Medea’s boys will most likely suffer a painful and gruesome death. Medea also tells in the play that she knows clearly the pain of being an exile, so she doesn’t want her children becoming one either, thus, she will not take them with her to Athens. Thus, the best option, to Medea, for her boys, would be for Medea to give them a quick painless death. She says the above to herself many times, so we can conclude that is how she really feels.
So, Medea didn’t kill her boys to torment Jason, but for their own good. She most likely said that she killed her boys to torment Jason out of anger, and to infuriate Jason.
At the very end of the play, at line 1404-1405, when Jason says “just allow me a touch of the delicate skin of my sons,” I started to feel pity for Jason. I started to feel pity for Jason because he exposes his desperateness, and expresses himself as inferior for the first time, which made it easier for me to connect to him. Before, he was acting very cocky and was basically a jerk to Medea, for he would blame her for everything that’s happened though he knew clearly he was the one who did something wrong. However, in the two lines 1404 and 1405, Jason, for the first time, pleads Medea for something.
Finishing the book it brought into light for me how evil Medea is and how her acts of vengeance are very intelligent from her point of view. Seeing Jason die for her would be to easy because the pain he would feel would only be temporary as he would proceed to afterlife. By killing her two sons and by poisoning Jason’s new lover this would leave him with nothing but grief. The part that really stuck to me and emphasized the magnitude of the vengeance Medea was putting forth to Jason occurs after the death of their children. When Jason returns to late to stop Medea and save his kids; Medea then is about to leave to Athens and won’t even allow Jason to perform a proper burial and takes the kids with her. Jason now does not only have to grieve with the death of Creon, the princess, and his children; he also has to grieve with the fact his kids do not even receive a proper burial. In Oedipus, the main character Oedipus executed Aristotle’s definition of a tragic hero, in this play it was not the main character who was the tragic hero but yet a secondary character in Creon. Creon did not only had to deal with the death of his daughter then in the end he also gets poisoned as well. Creon tried his best to stop Medea but in the end it was his tragic flaw of sympathizing for Medea and granting her an extra for her to put her vengeance into action that ultimately killed him and his daughter.
ReplyDeleteI am surprised how layered this play seems to be. Even in Medea’s terribleness she fights for women. It seems that she is so consumed with hate that she does all of her actions irrationally but at the same time she “justifies” them and blames Jason. However, despite this commentary I was mostly stuck by how I do not like any of the characters. Jason is dumb and cruel and seems to only take things seriously at the end of the play. Medea is a truly evil person. I was struck by the fact that in the end the story seemed like a true tragedy instead of my opinion of Oedipus as having a silver lining. In the beginning of the play I saw Medea as a sad and clever woman and even though she was threatening revenge I never really viewed her as terrible. However, as the play continued I started to see the extent of her madness. In many ways I enjoyed the complexity of this play but at the same time I very much disliked its ending.
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