"Do you think that Euripides intended us to sympathise with Medea?"

Authors Avatar

“Do you think that Euripides intended us to sympathise with Medea?”

Euripides has a reputation for not like women, so we would expect there to be a great deal of scorn and an unsympathetic depiction of Medea coming from Euripidies. I have four parts to the way that my sympathies turn in Medea. Firstly I am sympathetic, then when we find Medea very scheming and plotting to kill her husband, Creon and his daughter and she enjoys thinking about it, our sympathies change. Then my sympathies change when we meet Jason for the first time and when we see Medea deliberating over whether or not she will kill her children. These scenes produce unsympathetic feelings for Jason but then afterwards we see how evil Medea can really be. But we also see Medea deliberating whether or not to kill he children and we see into her heart. Then in the end we are left in suspense about whether she will kill her children or not, when we find that she does, this alters our opinion yet again and I am more sympathetic to Jason. Overall I believe that Euripides intended us to not sympathise with Medea all together, but sympathise with her enough, to be shocked in the end when she kills her sons.

In the beginning of the play, our opinions of Medea are based on other people’s opinions of the situation. Therefor we sympathise with whomever the people sympathise with. We hear the Nurse talking about how wronged Medea is and how horrible Jason has been to her, so we have no sympathy for Jason: “ Since she first heard of Jason’s wickedness.”  And we sympathise with Medea : “ Poor Medea! …”

When we meet the Tutor he also has sympathy for Medea: “ Poor women! Has she not stopped crying yet?” Now the first two characters we meet both have sympathy for her and we have heard that she is crying and very upset. Our natural response to someone crying is to sympathise with him or her. If Medea had no emotion or didn’t seem to care, neither would we because we would think that she wasn’t hurt, but by saying she is crying we know she is The nurse says plainly of Jason: “ He is guilty” this backs up our bad view of the man. Although we sympathise with Medea, we are given clues that she isn’t just going to sit and cry about the situation, she is a strong women: “ Her mood is cruel, her nature dangerous, Her will fierce and intractable.” We see that the chorus is sympathetic to Medea, to us the chorus is the voice of reason, they see all that is going on in the play and respond to it, so therefor we are sympathetic: “ Tell her we are on her side.” Yet we are still reminded of Medea’s unpredictable nature, which makes our sympathy very shakeable, because we are not sure what Medea is going to do: “ She glares at us like a mad bull.” When we final meet Medea she tells her story in such a way that we have to sympathise. We learn that she is a foreign women, she has no where to go, she loved Jason and he has          “crushed her heart.” Medea’s constant appeal to the Gods, give the impression that she is in the right, and the gods that are our for justice, should help her. This again makes us believe that she is in the right.

Join now!

When we witness the meeting of Medea and Creon, we begin to become suspicious of Medea, and our sympathy for her begins to waver. This is because we see how manipulative she really is and how she is clever and knows exactly what button to push with everyone to get her way. She plays the innocent women and she say that she has no intention to harm Creons daughter: “...I bear no grudge against your happiness: marry your daughter to him, and good luck to you both.” But we know that in the previous scene she is not so ...

This is a preview of the whole essay