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.
