Euripides’s Medea brings two opposing forces to a head. On the one hand, there is the titular character: a mythical woman—granddaughter of Helios, the sun god, and niece of Circe, a powerful enchantress—who betrayed her divine family and killed her brother so she could be with a mortal. On the other hand, there is Jason: the mortal who is the object of Medea’s affections, who has achieved grandeur by stealing the Golden Fleece due to the heroine’s magical intervention. Their tragic love story feeds into the male fantasy of a man who subjects a powerful woman to his will.
The transformation of a female character from fierceness to obedience is the stuff of theatre history. Characters such as Katherina in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, who goes from savagely shunning marriage to championing wives’ obedience to their husbands, and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, whose fierce rejection of bourgeois society is turned against her by a sexually depraved man of good social standing, are expressions of social fears of the wild woman whose power must be kept in check. Both Katherina and Hedda become the victims of a male-dominated system that limits their possibilities. Katherina’s symbolic suicide (she kills the part of her that resists the norm) and Hedda’s actual one echo Medea’s final ascent towards the gods. Yet unlike Katherina and Hedda, Medea kills Jason’s future bride and her own two children, thereby exterminating the symbols of his male power.
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