Appendix B. Item 6
Unit 2, Lecture 3,
Medea: the Evolution
of a Master Passion
“One master passion
ruling in the breast
Like Aaron’s serpent
swallows all the rest”
—Alexander Pope
Themes In Medea
• In common with other Greek Drama: Protagonist
driven by “one tremendous urge” (Lind xviii)
• Certain uniquely Euripidean themes
• “sympathy for all the victims of society including womankind”
(Hadas viii)
• Protagonist suffers not “to illustrate some grand ethical
abstraction” but from hunger for a tolerable life (Hadas ix)
• “Disturbing rationalism” which challenges convention (Lind xx)
• Combine these and you get Medea: The destructive
and unbalanced “master passion” of Medea is
partially the creation of an unbalanced social order
which has blandly victimized her. The horror of
Medea is a “group effort”!
Euripides
Appendix B. Item 6
Major Characters in Medea
Major Characters in Medea
• Medea who proves that “one master passion ruling in the breast…swallows
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all the rest” as well as devouring her own family
Jason, Medea’s husband, former hero and leader of Argonauts, his
unheroic role in the play is to desert her for a new bride; his arrogant and
complacent disloyalty helps trigger Medea’s transformation from wronged
woman to vengeful monster.
Kreon: King of Corinth and father of Jason’s future bride. Unlike his
putative son-in-law, he recognizes that Medea is dangerous—but makes a
disastrous error in judgment when he gives her an extra day to prepare for
the exile he imposes on her. His injustice and miscalculation also contribute
the tragic disaster of the drama.
Aegeus: In return for a promise of help in his fertility crisis, Medea extracts
a promise of safe haven which will allow her to carry out her plan of revenge
with full confidence of “getting away” with it
Chorus: Corinthian women whose initial sympathy for Medea is turns to
horror at her final plans for vengeance. Even more than Oedipus, the
chorus exhibits a feeling of helplessness in the fact of the overweening
passions of the protagonist.
Appendix B. item 6
The “Cost” of a Passion
• Nurse in prologue (exposition) give the
exposition in which we learn the following:
– Medea’s sole life motive is her passion for
Jason
– Passion has led her to betray her family
– That Passion has been, in turn, betrayed by
Jason and
– The rejected passion is evolving into
something dangerous
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From Rejected Passion to Wounded Pride
• Rejection of love leaves only a fierce and wounded
pride
• She already carries the wounds of humiliation
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Memory of betrayed family
Experience of humiliating “foreignness”
The essential humiliation of womanhood
The essential humiliation of the “gifted.”
• These wounds make Jason’s rejection an
intolerable humiliation
– In part because they remove the very rationale for the
previous ones.
Appendix B. Item 6
From Wounded Pride to Pure Vengeance
• At first Medea’s transformation from devoted
wife to avenging fury wins the chorus’s
approval and the audience’s sympathy
• But as vengeance moves from driving force to
“total occupation,” Medea dissipates that
sympathy
• However, having gained the chorus’s promise
to keep silence, she has prepared a way to
fulfill her steadily evolving plans of revenge.
The Kreon “Assist”
• Both Kreon and Jason
quite unwittingly strengthen
Medea’s evolving passion
for vengeance while setting
themselves up for its
consequences
• Kreon infuriates her with
the “wise injustice” of exile
• But Kreon gives her a
chance to “get even” by
allowing her an extra day
Appendix B. Item 6
Evolving Plans of Revenge
• Kreon’s departure allows us to see how Medea’s motives “progress”
from infuriated humiliation to all-consuming vengeance as she
begins to plan her ‘payback.”
• First plan is brutal and direct: “three dead bodies” (375-6)
– While her plans will evolve, her motives will not: the following
statements are variations on a theme which will remain constant from
here to the end: she must not “give my enemies cause for laughter”
(379); “It shall not be. . ./That any man shall be glad to have injured me”
(392, 395)
– To prevent that all important humiliation, she must, if possible, make an
advance plan for escape.
– But captured or not, she must still kill her enemies
– The only change is in intensity: goes from dominant to “total.”
•
Chorus is with her
– Men’s broken pledges is associated with an unnatural reversing of the
world’s order
– And the dishonor of Medea wholly unjust
Jason’s “Assist”
• Jason appears and adds fuel to the fire
– His “shrugging off” of her sacrifices
– His effrontery in suggesting he’s done her a favor
– His belittling of the “love question”
• Chorus’s sympathetic comments nevertheless
foreshadow a shift in sympathy
– Pure sympathy for Medea as exile, but
– Sympathy for Medea as victim of “love in excess” implies
also implies criticism (only love “in moderation” is
“gracious”)
– Chorus’s later horror will spring from what the “excess” will
do!
Appendix B. Item 6
Aegeus’s “Assist”
• Answer to her hope for a safe exile
– Remember earlier statements about oaths?
• Why does she make him swear an oath?
• Any remaining “checks” on Medea’s her fury or
her schemes of vengeance have now been
removed
– This includes the chorus who engage in the “ritual of
supplication” but who have given their word
Final Evolution: From Dominant to Total
• Medea’s plans reveal a final perfection of motive
• Instead of two dead bodies, there will be four: The
king, the princess, and her own two children—but
Jason will live!
• Why should Jason live and the children die?
– Shall we take seriously her words to the chorus: “there is
none who can give them safely”?
– Her real motive in its triumphant monotony: “For it is not
bearable to be mocked by enemies” (781)
– If we have any further doubt, there are her further words:
“this is the best way to wound my husband”
Appendix B. Item 6
A Final Wavering underlines
the Total “Swallowing”
• Her conflict keeps her “human”
• But this same conflict also makes it clear that
she is acting deliberately—not swept away on
a sea of incoherent passion
– She aims at an awful perfection: “I shall not mar my
handiwork”
– She unblinkingly accepts the “evil” of her fury even
as she makes a final surrender to it.
• She is now wholly defined by the “master
passion” which has “swallowed all the rest”
Euripides Warning?
• Another Greek dramatist might have made
this play simply a warning against the excess
which destroys the “golden mean” of
moderation which that culture treasured
• In Euripides’ treatment, that excess does not
belong simply and solely to the protagonist,
but is a collaborative effort involving the
forces of injustice and blindness which help
generate an all devouring master passion