Medea And Jason Essay, Research Paper
Much of what has been written on bondage in Euripides has to make with the confined adult females taken in the Trojan War. But even ordinary family slaves like Medea & # 8217 ; s Nurse may & # 8216 ; betray features of the free which the free themselves do non possess & # 8217 ; ( N. T. Croally, Euripidean Polemic, Cambridge, 1994:102-3 ) and in this manner cast some visible radiation on the position of their Masterss and what the slave/free definition means in the drama and in a wider context.
In the Nurse & # 8217 ; s opening address the slave & # 8217 ; s voice is heard, possibly non shouting for freedom, but asseverating a minute of freedom that is non hers. The old paidagogos remarks on her impermanent forsaking of her responsibility to function her kept woman ( 50-2 ) , decreasing his co-worker & # 8217 ; s brief minute of freedom, so that the audience can non lose the fact that she is making something unusual, something unsubmissive. She is non heard from once more after the parodos, but the points of position she expresses are maintained from clip to clip.
Why does Euripides open a drama that is concerned with heroic workss and royal personal businesss with one and so two anon. slaves? How does their position light the cardinal figures?
Medea is mistress, despoina and despotis. She has ( one would say ) no mortal Masterss, but invokes Hecate as Persephone and as colleague ( 395-7 ) . But Medea does talk of Masterss as if her position were more equivocal. When she is reflecting on the position of adult females, talking by and large of matrimony, she calls the hubby a & # 8216 ; maestro for the organic structure & # 8217 ; ( 233 ) and more specifically claims that she had been carried off as loot ( 256 ) . That is, she sees that a adult female & # 8217 ; s function in matrimony is like that of a slave.
The loss of place and the dismissal of her Son by Creon prompt her
to reject her inferior position and confirm herself as granddaughter of Helios, girl of a baronial male parent, a free adult female ( 406 ) . Like her slave the still incapacitated Medea begins to asseverate a power she can non hold and which she even admits non holding.
Both Jason and Creon try to enforce a weaker position on her. Creon repeats his bid five times ( 272-3, 274, 321, 333, 351-4 ) . Jason uses a long list of derogatory words and take downing looks to depict and intimidate her. His whole attitude is of a maestro toward an boisterous dependant, as if he could dispose of her with his superior intelligence, money, and words.
Medea & # 8217 ; s address to Jason in the 4th episode is consummate. She represents herself in the metaphor of the domination of ground over passion that reveals how deep-rooted the justification of bondage is in the Grecian mind as utilizing Son to get the hang her passion ( 872 ) . She is a new adult female now ( 893 ) and more like a adult male. She makes herself both: the sensible adult female ( i.e. an imitation of a adult male ) to whom work forces can speak and at the same clip the emotional adult female whom work forces can rule. Jason so does both. Having conceded to him the right to words, Medea so entraps him in her ain ( 932 ) : eis emous H keis logous.
Medea & # 8217 ; s Son in this scene has been a new, invented Medea who uses words to rule herself ( 872 ) , while the existent Medea dominates Jason with his ain ( besides spurious ) logoi. Logos is associated with words of command, but eventually gold is more powerful than words or ground ( 965 ) and more persuasive to a bride than even her new hubby. Having mastered the words and the adult male, in a concluding use she refers to Jason & # 8217 ; s new married woman as & # 8216 ; my kept woman & # 8217 ; ( 970 ) , a concluding sarcasm, a concluding justification of her workss, a concluding rejection of the low-level function.
