Looking at Medea by Stuttard David;

Author:Stuttard, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

9

Medea’s Vengeance

Hanna M. Roisman

Judging by its prominence in the extant Greek tragedies, the subject of vengeance greatly engaged the ancient playwrights and their audiences. The determination to avenge the murder of Agamemnon drives the plot of the plays on the House of Atreus (Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electras), and the consequences of Ajax’s aborted attempt to avenge an affront by Odysseus and the Atreidae drives the plot of Sophocles’ eponymous play. Vengeance figures in Euripides’ Bacchae, is an important motif in his Hecuba, and is the central concern of his Medea. The strong emotions – anger, sense of injury, and sense of righteousness – that drive acts of revenge and the intrigues and tensions involved in accomplishing them make for riveting theatre, as does the gratification of getting one’s own back for an injury.

Medea differs from most of the extant revenge plays. With the exception of Bacchae and Ajax, these dramatize revenge for the murder of a family member by means of the reciprocal murder of the killer and others involved in the deed. In Euripides’ Medea, as in the myth, the revenge is for a husband’s abandonment of his wife for another woman, and the punishment is not the murder of the husband but of his prospective bride and father-in-law and of his children. There is a huge and disconcerting dys-fit between the rather banal and hardly uncommon offence and the dire punishment that is meted out. In this chapter, I will try to show how Euripides’ play highlights this dys-fit in a way that forces the audience to reconsider their attitudes towards revenge.

As Burnett points out, among early Greeks, revenge ‘was not a problem but a solution’.1 It was presented in the revenge plays as a direct means of righting wrongs and obtaining justice (e.g. Aeschylus, Eumenides 459–69, 739–43; Sophocles, Electra 528–33, 580–3; Euripides, Electra 87–9, 1147–61). In Euripides’ Medea, it was underpinned by the generally accepted ethos of reciprocity: of returning good for good, and harm for harm, or, as it is usually put, of helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies (cf. 809). Yet revenge may also be extremely disruptive. Thus, Sophocles’ Ajax depicts the hero’s attempted vengeance as an act of madness; his Electra compares the avengers to the inescapable hounds who hunt down evil crimes (1385–8). In Medea, Euripides confronts the audience with the implications of their ethos of revenge. His strategy is first to dramatize the allure of revenge, then to dramatize its horror (764–1316), and finally to end the play on a note of uncertainty and irresolution (1317–419).

The first part of the play (1–763) leads the audience to share Medea’s compelling desire for revenge and her view of it as necessary and right. To do this, Euripides made Medea a figure of identification, whose feelings and desires the audience could share. This was no simple matter. The Medea of myth was a dangerous sorceress and foreign princess from the East, whose origins alone marked her for many of the audience as a lawless, uncivilized barbarian.

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