Gender Stereotypes In Euripides 'Medea'

Historically females have been portrayed as being weak and submissive, obeying their male counterparts (fathers/husbands etc) and staying in the background looking after the home and the children. To be freethinking was unheard of; all decisions were made by the male which the female had to comply with, whether or not she wanted to. This went for everything from arranged marriage to who she could associate with. There was also the generalisation that women were incapable of rational thought and prone to madness. Sons were considered more important than daughters, as they were the heirs and would continue the family name, and, of course, they were males who were regarded as strong, dominant and rational. In this essay, I shall be comparing and …show more content…
Having given up her country, committed murder and made herself an outcast, for the love of Jason, Medea was rightly angry when she was cast aside in favour of another younger woman. Recognising the prejudice and indifferent treatment to women of that time, Euripides used Medea as a representation of all women’s feelings and experiences, embodying pain, jealousy, passion and unfairness, especially in a family breakdown. Medea became a spokeswoman for them but he creates her as an antithesis of the common idea by giving her a mind of her own, power and hold over the male characters; using her femininity to charm and manipulate, which was inconceivable in those …show more content…
We can see the same wily, manipulative female in both Medea and Wide Sargasso Sea, how circumstances cause women to act in irrational, insane ways and the lengths they are prepared to go to get their own way . Euripides left the judgement of Medea to his audience, it was up to them to decide if she deserved sympathy as a foreigner in her husbands country, no longer wanted by anyone or if she was indeed a terrible, self loving witch. Perhaps the fact he was male and wrote for an all male cast, makes her seem more evil than desperate, for how can a man ever truly understand a female emotion? Jean Ryhs however, humanises Antoinette and makes us feel sorry for her, but at the same time makes her an object of ridicule and portraying white women in general as weak, helpless creatures who are tightly bound into society, whereas the black women although ex-slaves and seemingly without anything materialistic, are free to do whatever they