Bad Women of Euripides

Bad Women of Euripides

 “Bad women.” When David Greene commented on the heroines of Euripides work it begs the question of how he is defining a ‘bad woman’. It also begs to know why women who defied the laws are bad and the men were merely heroes. The answer is simple, Euripides made no such distinction when he was writing his work. A person could be a hero whether they were man or woman causing the creation of psychological tragedy.

Euripides was a modern of his time and lived in a very different world than many of his fellow playwrights. Euripides was known to spend a great deal of time around philosophers many of whom were married to women they considered their equal. Rather than being exposed to women whose purpose was to be property he was exposed to educated women who could maintain themselves in an argument with a man and did not need men to win a fight for them. In short, they were not damsels who were in need of rescuing but rather women who could solve their own problems.

This brings to the next point, the purpose of the plays. During the period where Euripides was writing the plays were being offered up in trilogy format. Each playwright was expected to write two tragedy and one comedy to be presented at festivals. Once each play was performed then they would be rated and a winner chosen from the audience. A win meant a great deal including patronage and prestige so a playwright must choose a theme they think will stand out among the plethora of Hercules and Iliad tales that were so well known. It was in Euripides best interest to shock the audience with a new perspective so that when it came time to vote they would remember his show. Whether he meant to lure people in through passion or the power of spectacle Euripides had a passion for writing strong willed women who would not be the lesser to a man.

One such example would be Medea. Medea was a woman who was abandoned by her husband, the hero Jason, and chose to murder her children rather than leave them in the care of her husband and his new wife. At first glance this appears to be a monstrous concept that a woman would kill her children however once taken into perspective there was little else she could do. Medea was not a Greek woman. She was brought to Greece by Jason after the Golden Fleece adventures and this left her scorned by a society that had building disdain for foreign barbarians.  

At this point in history Greece had recently passed laws that said you were not a Greek unless you could prove you had come from Greece for so many generations. This meant when he left Medea and his two children by her she had nowhere to turn that would openly accept her. The one friend she found would not take her children for fear of war. So rather than wander helplessly into the wilderness Medea forms a plan to extract her revenge upon Jason and do her children the less harm than what he may do to them. The story ends with her doing just that. Medea takes everything away from Jason that he had tried to take away from her leaving him with nothing and then she is taken away by the gods. Medea follows the same process that a man would have however she is caught in a double standard. Where a man would be a hero she is arguably a villain simply because her gender demanded it.

That being said the play must have worked well for Euripides since the year that he performed it he won third place in the festival which encouraged him to write more about the strong willed women he must have admired. Euripides takes special care to ensure that the women who act within his plays act as if they were men who voiced their emotions. This reversal of role made a political comment on the standing in Greece as well as commented on how outsiders were treated. If either of these political positions were different then perhaps Medea would have had a choice where she could have supported her children without a husband rather than kill them.

Another alternative as to what made these women so ‘bad’ comes back to the men that Euripides spent his time with. Euripides, as stated before, was fond of keeping the company of philosophers one of which may have been Plato and the men familiar with the work of Plato. This is important because it was Plato who introduced the concept of the perfect Form. For every object in existence there is the existence of a perfect form that all should strive to be closer too. However a problem occurred when trying to determine what the perfect for of a human being or specifically a woman was. These perfect forms were based upon social norms rather than functionality like you could apply to an object.

This could imply that Euripides wrote these women not so they could defy social norms but so that they could participate in a social experiment where Euripides could test one of the philosophical theories that he had heard. If the perfect form of a woman was a woman who was docile and acted as an object until her husband called upon her to act them he must have wondered what would happen if a woman was to try and achieve a form closer to that of a man and what would the fallout be.

The written work whether meant to be read or acted out is an excellent way to test a societal concept on a group of people. It allows for a controlled environment that is by definition safe from any actual harm and as long as all characters act true to themselves and their surroundings then something can be learned from both the antagonists in the play as well as the audience. By writing these, Euripides was able to judge the audience as well as Plato’s theory while the audience judged and commented upon his work.

In short Euripides social experiment of exceptional women allowed for the psychological tragedy that would shock the audience and force them to look at the way society functioned in a new light.