Medea Research Paper

Medea (Greek: Μήδεια / Mēdeia) is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC. The plot centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed her for another woman. Euripides produced the Medea along with Philoctetes, Dictys and the satyr play Theristai, winning the third prize (out of three) at the City Dionysia festival for that year.[1]
The play tells the story of the revenge of a woman betrayed by her husband. All of the action of the play is at Corinth, where Jason has brought Medea after the adventures of the Golden Fleece. He has now left her in order to marry
Glauce, the daughter of King Creon (Not to be confused with King Creon of Thebes) (Glauce is also known in Latin works as Creusa - see Seneca the Younger's Medea and Propertius 2.16.30). The play opens with Medea grieving over her loss and with her elderly nurse fearing what she might do to herself or her children.
Creon, also fearing what Medea might do, arrives determined to send Medea into exile. Medea pleads for one day's delay. In the next scene Jason arrives to confront her and explain himself. He believes he could not pass up the opportunity to marry a royal princess, as Medea is only a barbarian woman, but hopes to someday join the two families and keep Medea as his mistress. Medea, and the chorus of Corinthian women, do not believe him. She reminds him that she left her own people for him ("I am the mother of your children. Whither can I fly, since all Greece hates the barbarian?"), and that she saved him and slew the dragon. Jason promises to support her after his new marriage, but Medea spurns him: "Marry the maid if thou wilt; perchance full soon thou mayst rue thy nuptials."
Next Medea is visited by Aegeus, King of Athens; he is aggrieved by his lack of children, and does not understand the oracle that was supposed to give him guidance. Medea begs him to protect her, in return for her helping his wife conceive a child. Aegeus does not know what Medea is going to do in Corinth, but promises to give her refuge in any case, provided she can escape to Athens.
Medea then returns to her plotting how she may kill Creon and Glauce. She decides to poison some golden robes (a family heirloom and gift from the sun god), in hopes that the bride will not be able to resist wearing them, and consequently be poisoned. Medea resolves to kill her own children as well, not because the children have done anything wrong, but because she feels it is the best way to hurt Jason. She calls for Jason once more, falsely apologizes to him, and sends the poisoned robes with her children as the gift-bearers. "Forgive what I said in anger! I will yield to the decree, and only beg one favor, that my children may stay. They shall take to the princess a costly robe and a golden crown, and pray for her protection."
The request is granted and the gifts are accepted. Offstage, while Medea ponders her actions, Glauce is killed by the poisoned dress, and Creon is also killed by the poison while attempting to save her. These events are related by a messenger. "Alas! The bride had died in horrible agony; for no sooner had she put on Medea's gifts than a devouring poison consumed her limbs as with fire, and in his endeavor to save his daughter the old father died too."
Medea is pleased with her revenge thus far, but resolves to carry it further: to utterly destroy Jason's plans for a new family, she will kill her own sons. She rushes offstage with a knife to kill her children. As the chorus laments her decision, the children are heard screaming. Jason rushes to the scene to punish her for the murder of Glauce and learns that his children too have been killed. Medea then appears above the stage in the chariot of the sun god Helios; this was probably accomplished using the mechane device usually reserved for the appearance of a god or goddess. She confronts Jason, reveling in his pain at being unable to ever hold his children again: "I do not leave my children's bodies with thee; I take them with me that I may bury them in Hera's precinct. And for thee, who didst me all that evil, I prophesy an evil doom."
She escapes to Athens with the bodies. The chorus is left contemplating the will of Zeus in Medea's actions: Manifold are thy shapings, Providence! Many a hopeless matter gods arrange. What we expected never came to pass, What we did not expect the gods brought to bear; So have things gone, this whole experience through!"

Themes

Euripides' characterization of Medea exhibits the inner emotions of passion, love, and vengeance. Medea is widely read as a proto-feminist text to the extent that it sympathetically explores the disadvantages of being a woman in a patriarchal society,[2] although it has also been read as an expression of misogynist attitudes[3]. In conflict with this sympathetic undertone (or reinforcing a more negative reading) is Medea's barbarian identity, which would antagonize a fifth-century Greek audience.[4]

[edit] Euripidean innovation and reaction

Although the play is considered one of the great plays of the Western canon, the Athenian audience did not react so favorably, and awarded it only the third place prize at the Dionysia festival in 431 BC. A possible explanation might be found in a scholium to line 264 of the play, which asserts that traditionally Medea's children were killed by the Corinthians after her escape;[5] Euripides' apparent invention of Medea's filicide might have offended its audience just as his first treatment of the Hippolytus myth did.[6]
In the 4th century BC, South-Italian vase painting offers a number of Medea-representations that are connected to Euripides' play — the most famous is a krater in Munich. However, these representations always differ considerably from the plots of the play or too general ones to support any direct link to the play of Euripides - this might reflect the judgement on the play. However, the violent and powerful character of princess Medea, and her double — loving and destructive -became a standard for the later periods of antiquity and seems to have inspired numerous adaptations thus became standard for the literal classes.
With the rediscovery of the text in first-century Rome (the play was adapted by the tragedians Ennius, Lucius Accius, Ovid, Seneca the Younger and Hosidius Geta, among others), again in 16th-century Europe, and in the light of 20th century modern literary criticism, Medea has provoked differing reactions from differing critics and writers who have sought to interpret the reactions of their societies in the light of past generic assumptions; bringing a fresh interpretation to its universal themes of revenge and justice in an unjust society.
Euripides lived during the Golden Age of Athens, the city where he was born and lived most of his years. Born in 484 BC, his infancy saw the repulsion of the Persian invasion, a military victory that secured Athens' political independence and eventual dominance over the Mediterranean world. His death in 406 came as Athens was surrendering its supremacy as a result of its protracted defeat to Sparta, its main rival, in the Peloponnesian War. Sandwiched between these two wars lies a creative period of political, economic, and cultural activity that spawned many of Western civilization's distinctive traits, including the flourishing of tragic drama. The art was mastered by Euripides' older contemporaries, Aeschylus and Sophocles, playwrights who created the dramatic tradition that he would amplify significantly.
[pic]Although he is reputed to have written 92 plays, of which 17 (more than any other Classical playwright) survive, Euripides' standing as a dramatist has often been disputed, especially during his lifetime. While Aristotle heralded him "the most tragic of poets," he also criticized Euripides' confused handling of plot and the less-than-heroic nature of his protagonists. Aristophanes, a comic dramatist, constantly mocked Euripides' tendency towards word-play and paradox. Euripides' role as a dramatic innovator, however, is unquestionable: the simplicity of his dialogue and its closeness to natural human speech patterns paved the way for dramatic realism, while the emotional vacillations in many of his works created our understanding of melodrama. Admired by Socrates and other philosophers, Euripides also distinguished himself as a free thinker; criticisms of traditional religion and defenses of oppressed groups (especially women and slaves) enter his plays with an explicitness unheard of before him. More than edifying pieces of art, works such as The Bacchae, Trojan Women, Iphigenia at Aulis, Alcetis, and Electra would become basic components of the Athenian citizen's political education.
As with most of the myths recounted in ancient Greek tragedy, the story-line of Euripides' Medea, originally produced in 431 BC, is derived from a collection of tales that circulated informally around him. His audience would have been familiar with its general parameters and many of its specifics. The play's merit consequently lies in its manner of exposition and its emotional focus, which Euripides places squarely in the flights of amoral passion that afflict the protagonist, Medea. Her infamous murders of her own children challenged the Athenian moral universe that continually hovers in the background of the play.

Comprehensive Summary

Euripedes' Medea opens in a state of conflict. Jason has abandoned his wife, Medea, along with their two children. He hopes to advance his station by remarrying with Glauce, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth, the Greek city where the play is set. All the events of play proceed out of this initial dilemma, and the involved parties become its central characters.
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Outside the royal palace, a nurse laments the events that have lead to the present crisis. After a long series of trials and adventures, which ultimately forced Jason and Medea to seek exile in Corinth, the pair had settled down and established their family, achieving a degree of fame and respectability. Jason's recent abandonment of that family has crushed Medea emotionally, to the degree that she curses her own existence, as well as that of her two children.
Fearing a possible plot of revenge, Creon banishes Medea and her children from the city.
After pleading for mercy, Medea is granted one day before she must leave, during which she plans to complete her quest for "justice"--at this stage in her thinking, the murder of Creon, Glauce, and Jason. Jason accuses Medea of overreacting. By voicing her grievances so publicly, she has endangered her life and that of their children. He claims that his decision to remarry was in everyone's best interest. Medea finds him spineless, and she refuses to accept his token offers of help.
Appearing by chance in Corinth, Aegeus, King of Athens, offers Medea sanctuary in his home city in exchange for her knowledge of certain drugs that can cure his sterility. Now guaranteed an eventual haven in Athens, Medea has cleared all obstacles to completing her revenge, a plan which grows to include the murder of her own children; the pain their loss will cause her does not outweigh the satisfaction she will feel in making Jason
suffer.
For the balance of the play, Medea engages in a ruse; she pretends to sympathize with Jason (bringing him into her confidence) and offers his wife "gifts," a coronet and dress. Ostensibly, the gifts are meant to convince Glauce to ask her father to allow the children to stay in Corinth. The coronet and dress are actually poisoned, however, and their delivery causes Glauce's death. Seeing his daughter ravaged by the poison, Creon chooses to die by her side by dramatically embracing her and absorbing the poison himself.
A messenger recounts the gruesome details of these deaths, which Medea absorbs with cool attentiveness. Her earlier state of anxiety, which intensified as she struggled with the decision to commit infanticide, has now given way to an assured determination to fulfill her plans. Against the protests of the chorus, Medea murders her children and flees the scene in a dragon-pulled chariot provided by her grandfather, the Sun-God. Jason is left cursing his lot; his hope of advancing his station by abandoning Medea and marrying Glauce, the conflict which opened the play, has been annihilated, and everything he values has been lost through the deaths that conclude the tragedy.

Characters

Medea - Protagonist of the play, Medea's homeland is Colchis, an island in the Black Sea, which the Greeks considered the edge of the earth--a territory of barbarians. A sorceress and a princess, she used her powers and influence to help Jason secure the Golden Fleece; then, having fallen in love with him, she fled her country and family to live with Jason in Iolcus, his own home. During the escape across the Mediterranean, she killed her brother and dumped him overboard, so that her pursuers would have to slow down and bury him. While in Iolcus, she again used her devilish cleverness to manipulate the daughters of the local king and rival, Pelias, into murdering their own father. Exiled as murderers, Jason and Medea settled in Corinth, the setting of Euripides' play, where they established a family of two children and gained a favorable reputation. All this precedes the action of the play, which opens with Jason having divorced Medea and taken up with a new family. The play charts Medea's emotional transformation, a progression from suicidal despair to sadistic fury. She eventually avenges Jason's betrayal with a series of murders, concluding with the deaths of her own children. Famously, the pleasure of watching Jason suffer their loss outweighed her own remorse at killing them.
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Jason - Jason can be considered the play's villain, though his evil stems more from weakness than strength. A former adventurer, he abandons his wife, Medea, in order to marry Glauce, the beautiful young daughter of Creon, King of Corinth. Hoping to advance his station through this second marriage, he only fuels Medea to a revenge that includes the deaths of his new bride, her father, and his children. Jason's tactless self-interest and whiny rationalizations of his own actions make him a weak, unsympathetic character.
Children - The offspring of Jason and Medea, the children are presented as naïve and oblivious to the intrigue that surrounds them. Medea uses them as pawns in the murder of Glauce and Creon, and then kills them in the play's culminating horror. Their innocent deaths provide the greatest element of pathos--the tragic emotion of pity--in the play.
Chorus - Composed of the women of Corinth, the chorus chiefly serves as a commentator to the action, although it occasionally engages directly in the dialogue. The chorus members fully sympathize with Medea's plight, excepting her eventual decision to murder her own children.
Creon - The King of Corinth, Creon banishes Medea from the city. Although a minor character, Creon's suicidal embrace of his dying daughter provides one of the play's most dramatic moments, and his sentence against Medea lends an urgency to her plans for revenge.
Glauce - Daughter of Creon, Glauce is the young, beautiful princess for whom Jason abandons Medea. Her acceptance of the poisoned coronet and dress as "gifts" leads to the first murder of the play. Although she never utters a word, Glauce's presence is constantly felt as an object of Medea's jealousy. (Glauce is also referred to as Creusa.)
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Aegeus - The King of Athens, Aegeus passes through Corinth after having visited the Oracle at Delphi, where he sought a cure for his sterility. Medea offers him some fertility-inducing drugs in exchange for sanctuary in Athens. His appearance marks a turning point in the play, for Medea moves from being a passive victim to an aggressor after she secures his promise of sanctuary.
Messenger - The messenger appears only once in the play--he relates in gruesome, vivid detail the death scenes of Glauce and Creon, which occur offstage.
Nurse - Caretaker of the house, the nurse of the children serves as Medea's confidant. Her presence is mainly felt in the play's opening lament and in a few speeches addressing diverse subjects not entirely related to the action of the play.
Tutor - A very minor character, the tutor of the children mainly acts as a messenger, as well as the person responsible for shuffling the children around from place to place.

Lines 1-16

Summary

Outside of Jason's adopted house in Corinth, a nurse recounts and laments the chain of events that have lead to the present crisis in the city, where Medea's "world has turned to enmity" (line 15). Jason and the crew of his ship, the Argo, began this history by sailing to Colchis, a city in Asia and Medea's home, in search of the legendary Golden Fleece. Medea, a sorceress and princess, fell in love with Jason, used her magic to help him secure the Fleece, and eventually fled with him to Iolcus, Jason's home. There she continued to use her magic and to participate in intrigues within the royal house, eventually tricking the daughters of a rival king, Pelias, into poisoning their own father. After accepting sanctuary as exiles in Corinth, Jason and Medea had two children, now young boys, and achieved a degree of respectability, earning them a "citizens' welcome" (line 12) in the city. Recently, however, Jason has abandoned Medea and his own children in order to remarry with Glauce, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. Jason hopes thereby to advance his own station, perhaps even to succeed as king.

Commentary

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The nurse's lament expresses an impossible desire: to undo the past. Medea, Jason, the chorus, and others will replay their own versions of this futile wish at various stages in the play. Jason and Medea each express remorse at having inaugurated the events the nurse recounts here; their past love has doomed them in the present.
Tragedy, as an art form, often imparts a very basic message: actions, premeditated or not, bear consequences that must be recognized and endured. A great deal of drama simply revolves around a hero or protagonist suffering through his or her actions and generating a perspective in relation to them (think Hamlet ). Medea, however, is a play that conspicuously lacks any such self-conscious recognition of error by its characters; no one develops a mature perspective on his or her own actions. As the nurse reveals to us, Jason abandons Medea on a whim. Although this abandonment precipitates disastrous results to himself and all those surrounding him, Jason never acknowledges his responsibility for the suffering he has created. Like the nurse here, he simply wishes things had never happened. The predominant mood of the play is denial, and the nurse's tone in these opening moments resonates with everything that will follow.
The story of Jason and the Argonauts was already well-known to Euripides' audience, perhaps second in popularity only to Homer's accounts of the Trojan war. In keeping with Euripides' overriding themes, the nurse selects only those elements that echo with the succeeding action, particularly Medea's cleverness, guile, and willingness to sacrifice connections to family and kingdom in order to pursue the flights of her passions. Unlike Jason, who uses deceptive rationalizations to avoid facing the consequences of his own actions, Medea simply rides her passions unthinkingly. Even before Creon banishes Medea, she is already a perennial exile, unconcerned with the chains of responsibility that bind her. The most visible signs of abandoned responsibility are Jason and Medea's children; shuttled around the stage, used in a murder plot, and then murdered themselves, their silent characters will be masterfully handled by Euripides as testimony of the play's most significant absence--accountability. Thus, the nurse's opening lament establishes both the tone of denial and theme of lost accountability that pervade the entire play.

Lines 17-130

Summary

The nurse testifies to the degree of emotional shock Jason's "betrayal" has sparked in Medea: she refuses to eat and spends her days bed-ridden, pining away her fate, especially her newly-awakened sense of homelessness. The long journey that brought her to Corinth has now left her with nothing. Medea's bitterness grows to such a degree that she even despises the sight of her children. The nurse becomes afraid that some vicious plot is brewing in Medea's mind.
[pic]The boys, oblivious to the intrigue that surrounds them, exit the house with their tutor and end the nurse's meditations. The tutor shares the nurse's sympathy for Medea's plight, but also points out that the worst news has yet to reach her: there is a rumor circulating among men in the city that Creon plans to banish Medea and her children from Corinth.
Medea's first words are cries of helplessness issued from inside the house, off-stage. She wishes for her own death. The nurse fears the possible effects of this inflexible mood and sends the children inside to shelter them. In another off-stage cry, Medea curses her own children and their father, Jason, ultimately wishing the death and destruction of the entire household.
The nurse responds to Medea's anger in a soliloquy that expresses the incomprehensibility of Medea's wish to punish her own children for Jason's offense. She attributes part of Medea's stance to her queen-like mentality, which accustoms itself to issuing commands and never compromising its own will, even when it is consumed by a state of rage. Against these tendencies of the wealthy, the nurse preaches the virtues of a "middle way, neither great or mean" (line 126), which can supply the foundation for a peaceful and ordered life, unmarred by the conflicts now afflicting her master and mistress' home. The nurse's own status as a slave has availed her to the possibilities of this other, more humble life.

Commentary

After planting the crucial backdrop to the story, the play immediately introduces us to Medea's total despair upon being abandoned by Jason, offering in the process Euripides' fundamental psychological insight that victims of an intense emotional wound (Medea) not only turn against those who inflict it (Jason) but against their entire world of emotional attachments (her children). Euripides frames this insight in Medea's two opening cries: the first (lines 95-96) displays her suicidal helplessness, while the second (lines 110-114) expresses a wish/curse that every trace of her love for Jason be severed. By placing Medea off-stage, Euripides allows the audience to concentrate on her words and grasp them as a cipher to her whole character. When she eventually emerges in the flesh, the tenor of these initial remarks will cast a shadow over all her succeeding character development.
Against some interpretations of Medea, which claim she struggles between her devotion as a mother and her desire for revenge, we could infer from her first cries that her children's murder is fated from the beginning--the natural consequence of Medea's overwhelming emotional shock. The nurse ominously foreshadows that the "rage" stirring inside Medea will not "relax" until it has received an outlet, and the only real hope is that she can target an enemy rather than a friend (lines 94-95). Euripides' tragedies often present ordinary human beings under the sway of extraordinary forces that must be respected and understood, if not wholly accepted. While the nurse may preach the virtues of a "middle way," Medea's character testifies to the fact that such a cautious life remains unavailable to those preyed upon by fearsome impulses. The nurse interprets Medea's excesses as the product of a sense of royal entitlement, her queen-like need to command. It may be more correct, however, to view Media as a vehicle for something greater, as someone chosen by the gods (or the cosmos, for Euripides was often thought an atheist) to reveal inconvenient truths about human nature.

Lines 130-213

Summary

The chorus, composed of Corinthian women, turns towards the house and addresses Medea. They try to reason with Medea and convince her that suicide would be an overreaction. The fickleness of a husband's love is an ordinary occurrence; rather than merit self-torment, it should be dealt with and forgotten. Still within the palace walls, Medea remains unyielding and calls on the gods Themis and Artemis to sanction the death of Jason and his new wife. Because Medea accuses Jason of breaking an oath (his marriage vows), the nurse recognizes the gravity of Medea's threat; no one less than Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, watches over oaths and ensures their compliance. Entering the house in order to encourage Medea to talk with the chorus in person, the nurse performs another soliloquy, this one accusing the "men of old times" (line 190), who invented music, of foolishness. Created as an accompaniment to banquets and celebrations, their songs can never dispel the sorrow caused by broken homes--they have no real power, positive or negative. After the nurse enters the house, the chorus remarks that Themis, a goddess Medea invoked in her tirades against Jason, has already watched over her in the past--that is, during the various stages of the journey bringing her from the far-ends of Asia to Hellas, or Greece.

Commentary

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The function of the chorus varies slightly in every ancient Greek tragedy.
At times, the chorus is an active participant in the drama; at others, it can be merely a commentator or spectator. The chorus in Medea displays qualities of both, but its central task is to pass value judgments on the behavior of individual characters--its voice stands as the arbiter of objectivity in the play, supplying us with the most normative perspective on the events as they transpire. After having expressed a general sympathy with Medea earlier, the chorus now warns her against indulging in her emotions too severely, as her turmoil, while real, is a "common thing." Medea lacks this common sense perspective. The score of advisors that counsel her to refrain from indulging in her emotions only underscores Euripides' conceit that underneath common human problems (such as marriage breakup) rest potential forces that, although normally controlled, are capable of exploding into such extraordinary catastrophes as those recounted in his play. The chorus's viewpoint, then, though the most sensible, does not fully account for Medea's situation. As she puts it, she has left life behind (line 146) and become the conveyor of a higher, more cruel order of justice. Her appeals to the gods, especially as the protectors of oaths, reinforce her sense of purpose. The chorus' common sense perspective provides a useful counterpoint to Medea's far-reaching vision, and the interplay of each stands as a key source of
unresolved tension in the play.
The brief essay on music that Euripides inserts into the nurse's speech (lines 190-200) may superficially appear out of place, and the playwright was not above interjecting irrelevant commentary into his dramas. It's interesting, however, that the nurse's basic point is that music (and, by extension, all the arts the Greeks thought to be inspired by the Muses, including tragedy) does not hold the power to transform us emotionally; if we are sad, we will stay sad, if happy, we will stay happy. One of the hallmarks of tragedy is its supposedly cathartic effect--that is, by experiencing immense sorrow, we are purged of it. Euripides questionable status as a tragedian (see context and analysis) can be linked to the lack of catharsis evoked by his plays, and the nurse may be serving as his mouthpiece in this soliloquy, pointing to his plays as self-conscious explorations of the limits of his art. Euripides found a lack of authenticity behind the traditional form of tragedy, and his plays extended the art to explore new and different expressive possibilities.

Lines 214-447

Summary

Restraining her grief and displaying self-control, Medea emerges from her house to address the chorus in a long speech. She begins by condemning those who are quick to judge silent people without first learning their true character. Continuing in this vein of abstract dissertation, Medea laments the contemptible state of women: they are forced to become their husbands' possessions in marriage (with no security, for they can be easily discarded in divorce), they must endure the pains of childbirth, and they are kept from participating in any sort of public life (unlike men, who can engage in business, sport, and war). Once their home is taken from them, women like Medea are left with nothing. Medea makes a single plea to the chorus--that Jason be made to suffer for the suffering he has inflicted upon her as a woman. The chorus agrees that Jason deserves punishment.
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Having heard Medea's reproaches against Jason, Creon approaches the house to banish her and her children from Corinth, a course of action that had been rumored earlier. Creon fears that Medea may use her infamous cleverness to seek revenge against him, Jason, and his daughter Glauce, whose hand Jason has taken in marriage. Medea claims that her reputation as a clever woman inspires enmity in both the ignorant and the intelligent; the former find her incomprehensible and ineffectual, while the latter are jealous of her powers. Pointing out that the grudge she bears is directed against Jason, rather than Creon and his daughter, Medea pleads with the king to allow her to remain in Corinth, where she will endure her sufferings without protest. Creon is distrustful and unyielding, but ultimately agrees to provide Medea with one more day to make provisions for her family's flight into yet another exile.
As Medea prepares to wander into uncharted lands beyond the walls of Corinth, the chorus continues to lament her fate. Medea, however, is focused on the task she must accomplish over the course of the next day--that is, killing her three antagonists, "father and daughter; and my husband" (line 376). Considering the various possible means of murdering them, she settles on poison as the most effective. Medea calls on the goddess, Hecate, mistress of the underworld and the patroness of black magic, to serve as her accomplice in this mission. She also vows to restore honor to her lineage (Hyperion, the Sun-god, was her grandfather) and shame Jason's own tribe, which descends from Sisyphus. Finally, she concludes her prayer and tirade by claiming the natural affinity of women for acts of evil. The chorus responds to Medea in an imaginative ode, describing a world in which the presumed order of the sexes is reversed: men will be known for deception, women will be honored, male poets will lose their favor, and Apollo, the god of music, will inspire new epics that display a female perspective. The chorus continues by rehashing the tale of Medea's misfortune, "an exile with no redress" (439).

Commentary

Medea's first public pronouncement, a sort of "protest speech," provides one of the highlights of the play and demonstrates some of its complex, at times even contradictory, representations of gender. Simply at the level of character development, Medea's calm and reflective tone, especially after her preceding eruptions of despair and hatred, provides the first display of her unsettling ability to gather herself together in the midst of crisis and pursue her agenda with a staunch, almost inhuman determination. This split in her personality is to a certain degree gendered; the lack of emotional restraint is "typical" of women, and the uncompromising attention to principled action is the hallmark of heroic Ancient Greek males. Medea actually synthesizes these traits so that her uncontrollable emotions fuel her staunch principles, producing a character that fails to assume a clearly intelligible mold.
The speech itself highlights women's inarguably subordinate status in ancient Greek society, especially within the domain of public life. Euripides' introduction of such social criticism into his play remains remarkable because of how unprecedented it would have been to his audience. "Feminist" arguments, most of them not nearly so developed, were the province of a few renegade philosophers in ancient Greece. Works of art hardly ever explored political questions with any degree of self-consciousness. When Medea points out that women, especially "foreign" women, require some knowledge of magic and other covert arts to exert influence over their husbands in the bedroom, she argues for a kind of alternative power that women can enjoy, one that remains invisible to men and unacknowledged by society, yet sways each with unquestionable force. Medea also supplies a method for interpreting her own character towards the end of her speech (lines 251-257): we should read her history of exile as a metaphoric exaggeration of all women's alienation; in fact, her whole plight, past and yet to come, can be read as an allegory of women's suffering and the heights of tragedy it may unleash if left unattended. Under this model of interpretation, Medea portrays the rebellion of women against their "wretchedness." Such a transparent social allegory may seem forced or clichéd in our own contemporary setting, but in Euripides' time it would have been revolutionary, as tragedy generally spoke to the sufferings of a generic (perhaps idealized) individual, rather than a group. It would be a mistake, however, to claim that Medea's speech elaborates a clearly progressive political message, as her concluding remarks appeal to women's natural talent for devious manipulation (line 414). While Euripides' play manifests many revolutionary political sentiments, its social criticisms remain sporadic, forming just a part of some of the many trains of thought he follows.
Aside from providing a time frame that initiates a sense of urgency to the play (Medea only has a day to complete her plans), the exchange between Creon and Medea introduces the theme of her cleverness. At times, Medea appears more dangerous because of her cleverness than her rage--the latter would render her impotent if the former did not allow her to devise schemes for revenge. More than just a cold cunning, Medea's cleverness manifests a sensitivity to other people's psychological weak points: when Creon makes a casual reference to the absolute devotion he feels for his daughter, Medea appeals to him on behalf of her own children and secures the one-day grace period before his decree of banishment takes effect. Unlike other ancient tragedians who used dialogue more abstractly, Euripides places a lot of emphasis on revealing a character's personality through his or her way of maneuvering a conversation.
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Concluding this section, the choral song depicts the theoretical reversal of natural order (streams flow up mountains) that would accompany an exchange in social prominence between women and men. This song is a strange hybrid of an archaic artistic form and a radical political sentiment. Choral odes of this type were adopted by older tragedians (particularly Aeschylus) to demonstrate how human actions--especially a murder within the royal house--could set the universe out of whack, tying moral and natural phenomena together. In his characteristically innovative style, Euripides employs the device to suggest that a rise to power by women would similarly unhinge the universe--to contemplate their comeuppance remains as unnatural as a king's murder.

Lines 448-660

Summary

Jason emerges to rebuke Medea for publicly expressing her murderous intentions. While she grows more caustic, he remains in a balanced frame of mind and even presumes to sympathize with her. Immediately recoiling against his gestures of compassion, which Medea interprets as hypocritical "unmanliness" (line 466), she nevertheless uses the opportunity to tell Jason exactly how she feels. She begins by recounting how she helped Jason pass the tests her father had established for him to win the Golden Fleece. She continues by reciting the sacrifice she made in fleeing her father and homeland, as well as the role she played in King Pelias' death. Jason's betrayal after so much strikes her as the grossest offense possible; he has made their vows to each other, protected by Zeus, meaningless. She asks Jason where she could possibly go after he has deserted her--she cannot return home to the father and family she has abandoned, nor to any of the lands where she has made enemies through helping him. The chorus responds to her speech by commenting that the "fiercest anger" arises to fill the place of the "dearest love" (lines 520-521).
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After pointing out that Medea's cleverness as a speaker will force him to respond with equally persuasive arguments, Jason denies his debt to her and claims that solely Aphrodite, the goddess of love, holds responsibility for his safe passage home from Colchis. Furthermore, Jason argues that Medea gained far more than she lost in fleeing her homeland; among her newfound privileges he includes residence in a civilized country and a fame that would have been impossible had she remained at the "ends of the earth" (line 541). Lastly, Jason defends his choice to remarry as the best decision for all parties involved, rather than a selfish whim. Marriage with a king's daughter will secure a better life for his children, and Medea, if she could see past her jealousy, would be thankful to him. The chorus lauds Jason's reasoning, but still finds that he remains unjustified in divorcing Medea.
Medea believes that all Jason's arguments stem from a need to rationalize a decision that he intuitively recognizes as wrong. He is unequivocally corrupt, yet successfully hides behind a mask of rhetorical eloquence. Jason continues to offer any help he can provide her--for example, he suggests writing letters of introduction to friends abroad who might be willing to accept Medea into their home. Interpreting these tokens of help as Jason's manner of alleviating his own guilt, Medea refuses his offers and sends him away to his new bride.
Offering a hymn that expresses a wish to remain untouched by Aphrodite's arrows, which afflict their targets with a devastating passion, the chorus preaches against recklessness of love. No goodness can come out of violent desires, only endless disputes. The choral song continues by reiterating that exile represents the worst of all possible fates, a judgment the women of Corinth have formed through the example of Medea's own plight. They end by cursing men who unlock the "secrets" of female desire and then "disown" it (lines 659-660).

Commentary

Jason's arguments with Medea introduce his total lack of backbone as a character; he is the consummate whiner, making excuses for himself and patronizing Medea with the absurd claim that their divorce was for her benefit. Though obviously fueled by her anger, Medea's criticisms of Jason provide a much more convincing account of his actions than his own half-baked self-defense. Rather than supply his character with depth, Jason's offers of help underscore his half-hearted approach to human relationships--he is always offering people the bare minimum, whatever he can manage without sacrificing his self-interest. The play will ultimately punish Jason severely for his flaws, and his opening appearance introduces the stubbornly narrow perspective that will remain unchanged. None of the eventual suffering Jason witnesses sparks a reconsideration of his own responsibility for the destruction of his entire household. On a thematic level, the confrontation of wills highlights how Medea's steadfastness displays elements of heroism (or at least distinction), whereas Jason's makes him a limited, unsympathetic character. Furthermore, the character more in possession of his own reason, Jason, nevertheless exhibits a blindness to truth lacking in Medea's incisive, emotionally-charged speech. Like most tragedians, Euripides was fond of these paradoxes, as they pointed to limits within conventional ways of understanding and the sources of much human error.
While Jason's arguments offer ample opportunities for criticism, it should be recognized that the average Athenian of Euripides' time would have agreed with many of his viewpoints. His claim that Medea ultimately benefited by leaving barbaric Asia conforms with ancient Athens' self-image as the cradle of civilization. Athens' defeat of Persia (see context), an Asian kingdom, was a source of deep pride for its citizens, as well as a hallmark of their identity. In defeating this foreign empire, Athenians felt they had weeded out primitive values from their own culture and established the foundation for a new, enlightened form of life. Furthermore, Jason's attention to public status, even at the expense of domestic responsibility, is typical of the city's burgeoning commercial class. If Euripides' tragedies often serve as reproofs to the assumptions of his audience, then Jason's character can be interpreted as an exaggerated version of their own inclinations and pretenses. Medea, a woman who honors the ways upheld by the old, now "foreign" gods, represents forces that the Athenians were increasingly overlooking. Jason's suffering at her hands displays some of the consequences of a self-assured civilization's blindness to the power of its repressed values. While the cultural resonance of Medea's characters will be explored more in the succeeding commentary, it should simply be recognized here that Jason's perspective bears more than a personal prejudice; his limits belong to his place and time as well.

Lines 660-868

Summary

Aegeus, King of Athens, greets Medea as an old friend and recounts the story of his visit to the Oracle at Delphi. Seeking a cure for his sterility, Aegeus was given advice in the form of a riddle by the Oracle, who told him "not to unstop the wineskin's neck" (line 679). Aegeus is passing through Corinth on his way to seeing the King of Troezen, Pittheus, a man famous for his skill in interpreting oracular pronouncements. Medea relates to Aegeus the circumstances of her banishment from Corinth, to which he responds by expressing his sympathy for her predicament. Pleading with Aegeus for sanctuary in Athens, Medea offers him a gift in exchange--magical drugs that can restore his fertility. Aegeus seals his promise to offer Medea refuge with an oath before the gods.
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Alone on stage after Aegeus' departure, Medea screams out the names of the Olympian gods in excitement. The last obstacle to her plans for revenge has been cleared. Because of Aegeus' promise, Athens now stands as an unconditional sanctuary for her, even in her eventual condition as a polluted murderess. While the nurse listens in secret, Medea discloses the details of her plans. She will begin by pretending to agree with Jason's earlier arguments. Having drawn him into her confidence, she can then ask him to accept their two boys into his new family. The children will be used in a ploy to kill Glauce by bearing her gifts--a beautiful dress and gold coronet--which will be poisoned and kill anyone who touches them. Lastly, Medea will take the ultimate step of killing her own sons. Her revenge against Jason will then be total; the death of his own children along with that of his new bride will be the most severe injury he is capable of suffering, even if it means Medea must hurt herself in the process: "Yes, I can endure guilt, however horrible; the laughter of my enemies I will not endure" (lines 796-797).
The chorus, which had been entirely sympathetic with Medea's decisions, now warns her against violating the laws of human existence through her planned infanticide. Offering an ode to the city of Athens, praised for being a kingdom of "Grace" and "Knowledge," the women of Corinth question the possibility of Medea's acceptance into such a civilized society after committing the unnatural act of murdering her children. The chorus concludes its speech by expressing disbelief in Medea's ability to gather enough resolution to complete with her intentions. At the moment of crisis, she will break down and give in to her natural affections as a mother.

Commentary

The Aegeus scene has been pointed out as an example of Euripides' clumsy handling of plot. He arrives apparently out of nowhere, and his offer of sanctuary to Medea turns around the course of events without any logical justification. Yet, despite its abruptness, Aegeus' appearance does extend some themes of the play in often unacknowledged ways. Most obviously, the questions surrounding children continue to be highlighted. Aegeus' sterility makes him an easy target for the assaults of Medea's cunning. Children and marriage are a constant source of conflict in Medea. The sympathies they inspire cause characters to sever ties to home and family, form strange new allegiances, and even, as we will see in Creon's case, suffer death willingly.
At a more abstract level, the play's symbolic structure depends upon Medea's implication in the foundation of Athens. Athens' reputation for being synonymous with high culture and refined civilization, rehearsed by the chorus in its ode, was well-deserved but obviously only a partial truth. Unjustified cruelty existed there to the same extent as it did everywhere else. The exploitation of women and slaves, addressed in Medea and other Euripidean dramas, was much more severe in Athens than in many surrounding cultures. An ancient culture's myths, especially those that recounted its origins, served as the primary tool for fostering its self-image. The tales of mythic Athenian kings such as Aegeus, who established rule under the approving eyes of the Olympian gods, became arguments justifying the privileged status of Athenian customs and institutions. The presence of Medea, then, a barbarian sorceress and infamous murderess, at the beginnings of Athenian civilization challenge this simplistic picture of its origins and influence; despite Athens' pretensions towards enlightened greatness, it had already wed itself to primal, unrestrained powers at its very mythical roots. Freedom and refinement are not the whole story of the culture; a background of murderous intrigue underlies it and testifies to the persistence of injustice into Classical times. The Aegeus scene, while slightly contrived, adds this crucial thematic depth to the play.
Medea's speech after Aegeus' departure, her most self-confident to this point, rings with an oddly heroic tone. Her exuberance previews the complete transformation from despair to poise she will have undergone by play's end. From the beginning of the tragedy, she claims to be acting without respect to human norms, a judgment with which the chorus does not entirely corroborate until she clearly expresses a wish to kill her children at this stage. At times she attempts to justify their deaths through pragmatic arguments: Creon's family will kill them regardless, better that she accomplish the deed herself than watch them suffer at another's hands. Echoed in later moments, her statement in this speech that she would prefer enduring punishment than humiliation (lines 796-797) seems a more convincing account of her decision. The heroes of ancient Greece often display unswerving convictions to principles that do not conform to common sense, but the extremity of Medea's response to her betrayal forces a recognition of the ambivalence inspired by heroic temperaments; their willingness to let their pride run unrestrained makes them admirable and offensive at once.

Lines 869-1001

Summary

When Jason returns at the nurse's request, Medea begins to carry out her ruse. Expressing regret over her previous overreaction to Jason's decision to divorce and remarry, Medea goes so far as to break down in tears of remorse. Announcing a full reconciliation with her husband, she concedes each of the arguments that Jason made in their last discussion and releases the two boys into his embrace. Fully aware of Medea's expressed intentions, the chorus nevertheless hopes that she has actually changed her mind and decided to curb her desire for revenge. Pleased with how events are now panning out, Jason reimagines his future destiny: after growing into young warriors under the watchful eye of the gods, his children from both marriages will come together and make him a proud father by campaigning against his enemies.
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Medea once again breaks down into tears. When Jason inquires into the source of her weeping, she first responds by saying that tears come instinctively to women, then elaborates by saying that she remains upset about being forced to leave. The defensiveness and lack of force behind her statements hint that she may now feel a degree of ambivalence surrounding her planned course of action. Determined, however, she asks Jason that he appeal to Creon to allow their children to stay in Corinth. When Jason indicates uncertainty over being able to convince the King, Medea tells him to ask his wife, Creon's daughter, to make the plea for him. Medea then offers to bring Glauce the coronet and dress as gifts in exchange for her help. She emphasizes that the gifts must be delivered directly into her hands.
The chorus laments the now-assured doom of Medea's children. They imagine Jason's bride being unable to refuse the attractiveness of Medea's gifts, a perfect enticement for bringing a young and beautiful woman to her unsuspected death. The irony of Jason's position is also acknowledged: confident in his belief that events are unfolding in a manner that will secure the honor of his lineage, Jason is actually serving as an unwitting accomplice in the destruction of everything holding value for him.

Commentary

The balance of the play will continually evidence one of the hallmarks of dramatic art: irony of situation. Irony involves a cleft between appearance and reality. It can manifest itself in a play when a character, such as Jason, lacks a knowledge held by the audience or reader, such as Medea's plans to murder her children. Thus, Jason can be fully confident that Medea has changed her earlier convictions, while we understand that she only means to deceive him. The chorus, which stands apart from the action, often comments directly on the irony of a situation, and its speech in this section (lines 977-1001) serves to point out the complexity, one of the basic symptoms of irony, behind each character's evolving fate. The art of tragedy, which repeatedly stresses the limits of human knowledge, depends on irony to advance its themes; it produces the gap between what characters know and what they think they know.
Like the great tragedians before him, Euripides displays a complex approach to this stock dramatic device. When Medea erupts into tears at the mention of her children, she could be simply acting her part to elicit more of Jason's sympathy, or she could also be struggling internally with the decision she has made to murder them. In either case, her words to Jason are a front, and the audience or reader must look past them to infer her real motivations. Because Medea exhibits some complexity as a character, the reality behind her many appearances may be uncertain or vary from time to time. Deciphering her real moods and motivations requires interpretation within a broader context; for example, Medea's initial curses against her children would seem to challenge the veracity of her present sympathy for them. At times, however, it seems that by acting out false emotions, Medea reveals to herself true ones she had not previously considered. Jason's deeply ironic vision of his children's heroic future (lines 908-923), instigated by Medea's fake reconciliation with him, actually forces her to realize that she also partly desires a successful future for them, making their deaths (which are being sealed at the present moment) even more distressing to her. While the "real" or internal drama being enacted on stage manifests a degree of ambiguity at this point, Medea continues to plot the outward course of her revenge without much hesitation. Jason is totally duped into carrying out her will, and the chorus now considers a great deal of suffering and death to be hopelessly inevitable.

Lines 1002-1116

Summary

The tutor returns with news that the children are "reprieved from banishment" (line 1002) and that Jason's bride has warmly accepted Medea's gifts. The children no longer have any enemies in the city. Recoiling in horror, Medea admonishes herself, "How Cruel! How Cruel!" (line 1009). The tutor fails to understand her negative reaction to his good, anxiously anticipated news. Each character speaks past the other at this point, because Medea's secret intentions make her words gloss over the true source of her distress--the horrible inevitability of her children's death. She claims to be upset over the imminent separation from her children, and the tutor advises her to bear her burden with strength, since many mothers suffer the loss of their children, and some even lose them forever.
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Directly addressing her children, Medea protests against the farewell that she must soon offer them. All the experiences they have shared together as a family, including her bearing and rearing of them, will now come to nothing. The children, however, are unaffected by their mother's remorse and continue to play obliviously among themselves. In a speech to the chorus, Medea wavers repeatedly between abandoning and fortifying her decision to murder her children. Finally, she concludes, "Anger, the spring of all life's horror, masters my resolve" (line 1076), and decides to proceed with the murder.
After arguing that women are as capable of abstract reflection as men, the chorus sings a hymn about the "unnecessary" burdens children bring to human life. Parents suffer the constant anxieties of caring for and protecting them, as well providing them with an adequate inheritance. The possibility that death may snatch children away prematurely only compounds those other burdens. The energy parents expend on their children may prove ultimately fruitless.

Commentary

In her dialogue with the tutor, Medea amplifies the irony and complexity of her previous conversation with Jason. Her self-reproaches reveal the remorse she barely managed to hide earlier, and the anxieties she claims to feel over her imminent departure ring true at a deeper level (she is preparing for the definitive separation from her children in death). A tension suffuses the whole scene, as we sense Medea's desire to communicate the struggles of her conscience to her children; their silence and innocence seem to elicit a need for confession. The lack of understanding her children demonstrate parallels the lack of justification behind their deaths. The complicated discourses of the characters in Medea occasionally appear to be attaching a veneer of sense over the senseless, a process of self-deception to which the children, because they are silent, remain immune.
Medea's conflicting impulses, which have been enriching her recent conversations with ambiguities, achieve their fullest expression in the speech (lines 1041-1079) that concludes with her definitive resolution to murder her children. For the balance of the play, she will no longer question her decision. Consequently, this speech has often been seen as a definitive turning point in her thinking as a character. While it can be argued that her children's deaths are fated from the beginning (see commentary for lines 17-130), it nevertheless remains true that such a fate represents the triumph of perverse forces within human behavior. To reach the point of infanticide, basic human nature has to be transformed, ushering in conflict of some type. Consequently, Medea's motivational conflicts chart the course of natural sentiments warping to the point where something extraordinarily horrific can be accomplished. For example, Medea considers a natural, common sense course of action when she debates fleeing with her children to Athens, where they can renew their lives with guaranteed protection. Such a life would probably provide the most happiness out of the possible alternatives Medea contemplates, yet Medea's decision-making process has left behind debating over personal profit and loss. Her only loyalty is to her "anger" (1076), which has sprung out of her love and needs to vindicate itself through revenge. Abandoning her plan to punish Jason as severely as possible would be equivalent to denying the seriousness of her emotions and the offense they have suffered. Medea calls her forthcoming murders a "sacrifice" (line 1053), one offered for the sake of a higher principle than the logic of common sense can comprehend. Understanding Medea's extraordinary vindictiveness (a basic task for the reader or audience) begins with seeing it overstep the natural sentiments within her.

Lines 1117-1231

Summary

A messenger appears, frantically warning Medea to escape the city as soon as possible. When Medea asks him why, he responds by revealing that she has been identified as the murderer of Creon and Glauce, whose deaths have just taken place inside the palace. To the incomprehension of the messenger, Medea accepts the news with composed satisfaction and asks for the details of their deaths.
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Dwelling on the gruesome specifics, the messenger recreates the scene of the murder. Inside her bed-chamber, Jason's bride overcomes her reluctance to face Medea's children and accepts their gifts at his request. Entertained by the display of her own beauty in a mirror, she frolics around the room while showing off the coronet and dress. The picturesque scene begins to reverse itself as soon as the poison takes effect; her crown erupts in an unnatural fire and the corrosive dress begins to eat away her skin. She is left a monster unrecognizable to all but her father, who pathetically embraces her in order to die along her side. Though Creon flinches for a moment, "a ghastly wrestling match" (line 1214) ensues in which both bodies become entangled in a rotting heap. The messenger concludes his story by recognizing that intelligence brings men no advantages; happiness is the product of circumstance and fate.

Commentary

Aristotle and other commentators often criticized Euripides for having abandoned authentic tragedy in favor of grotesque melodrama. Whether or not we agree with their judgments, this elaborate murder scene bears many features that would not appear out of place in a contemporary B-movie horror film. After struggling emotionally through her moral dilemmas, Medea now appears in the mold of a hardened villain, interested solely in confirming the facts of her crime. Through the messenger's speech, we acquire our first glimpse (albeit limited) into Glauce's character, previously distinguished only by her reputed youth and beauty. Her display of vanity before the mirror--so sincere as to seem almost quaint--opens us onto a scene of luxury and self-satisfaction unique within Medea, temporarily relieving some of its building tension. Allowed to dwell on a physical setting, we are distracted from the weighty questions of conscience that have been recently demanding our attention. Glauce's complete defilement by the poison furnishes an elementary lesson on the volatility of beauty, and her father's dying embrace supplies a vivid ending to the scene. While essentially indulging an appetite for horror, Euripides does provide moments in the murder sequence that complicate the melodrama and make it slightly more human. Creon's brief attempt to disentangle himself from Glauce reveals a glitch in his fatherly devotion; even where they seek to be heroic, Euripides' characters are never excused human weaknesses and limits. Ultimately the scene's excesses do not have to be domesticated to remain convincing; the bizarre deaths simply provide a physical expression of the unnatural dimensions taken by Medea's will for revenge.

Lines 1317-1419

Summary

The palace opens its doors, revealing Medea and the two dead children seated in a chariot drawn by dragons. Impatient, Medea advises Jason to say what he has to say and finish the ordeal--the chariot, provided by her grandfather, the Sun-god, will soon carry them away.
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Jason curses himself for having ever wed himself to Medea. Jason believes he should have realized her capacity for evil and betrayal when she abandoned her family and homeland, even killing her own brother. He wishes only to be left alone now to mourn his tragic losses. Medea no longer feels the need to justify herself. She has wounded Jason, and that is enough. Jason points out that she has wounded herself in the process, and Medea, while acknowledging the pain her children's death has brought her, finds it a price worth paying to see Jason suffer.
Jason puts in one last request: to be allowed to see over the proper burial of his children. Medea denies him the right and decides she will bury them and expiate the crime herself. She then tells of her plans to flee to Athens with Aegeus, and finishes by divining an "unheroic death" (line 1388) for Jason, who will perish by being hit over the head with a log from his famous ship, the Argo. As Hyperion's chariot vanishes from sight, Jason laments this "grievous day" (line 1409) and calls on the gods to witness the affliction Medea has cast over his life. The chorus concludes by affirming that the gods work mysteriously and often bring events to a surprising end.

Commentary

Aside from rehashing Jason and Medea's previous arguments, the conclusion of the play provides the novel experience of watching Jason express himself without any condescension. Earlier he had painted himself as mature, high-minded, and capable of sympathizing with Medea's troubles, rather than following in her example of indulging in petty rage. With the murder of his children, he finally discards this facade of diplomacy and hurls sincerely-felt reprimands at Medea. He accuses her of an unthinkable savageness that has transformed her into the most detestable woman in the human race, a stain in the eyes of the gods. Medea does not deny his accusations and even encourages him to "loathe on!" (line 1376). From their first confrontation, she has often appeared less upset at the divorce itself than at Jason's complacent denial of any wrongdoing. While her murders do not elicit any repentance from Jason, they do dispel the delusion that he has been acting sensibly and working for a greater good. The pity he feels at his children's death opposes his earlier willingness to send them into exile, and the spontaneous quality of his present sentiments contrasts with the artifice of his initial reasoning, proving that he is not above the pull of passion. It would be an exaggeration, however, to consider this a significant character development. The play ends without him ever shouldering any of the blame for the murders; the only recognition he makes is of Medea's cruelty, which he had been completely underestimating previously.
Spoken by the chorus, the final lines of the play claim that the gods work mysteriously and that they have caused unforeseen events to transpire. The reference could simply be to the magical escape vessel that Hyperion has provided for Medea, but the elevated tone suggests a larger significance encapsulating the entirety of Medea's story. On one hand, the central events of the play can be explained without appealing to fate or other supernatural principles. Petty self-interest motivated Jason's divorce of Medea, and the intense anger she felt at being abandoned by him caused her to murder their children out of spite. Basic human psychology--an intelligible chain of moods and motivations--can explain these occurrences entirely. Yet the Greeks did not simply invoke their gods in lieu of natural explanations; rather, the gods attested to nature's ability to exceed ordinary human understanding and expectations. Medea's violent emotions are natural, but their forcefulness carries her beyond accustomed behavior and make her a testament to generally suppressed aspects of reality. In other words, the gods challenge humans to avoid receiving nature with complacence and to recognize its extraordinary, oft-ignored capabilities, many of the them fearsome and tragic. Euripides does not intend for Medea's murders to provoke a god-sanctioned sympathy for the violent excesses of nature, simply respect and understanding.
|The Medea tells the story of the jealousy and revenge of a woman betrayed by her husband. She has left home and father for |
|Jason's sake, and he, after she has borne him children, forsakes her, and betroths himself to Glauce, the daughter of Creon, |
|ruler of Corinth. Creon orders her into banishment that her jealousy may not lead her to do her child some injury. In vain she |
|begs not to be cast forth, and finally asks for but one day's delay. This Creon grants, to the undoing of him and his. Jason |
|arrives and reproaches Medea with having provoked her sentence by her own violent temper. Had she had the sense to submit to |
|sovereign power she would never have been thrust away by him. In reply she reminds her husband of what she had once done for |
|him; how for him she had betrayed her father and her people; for his sake had caused Pelias, whom he feared, to be killed by his|
|own daughters. |
|"I am the mother of your children. Whither can I fly, since all Greece hates the barbarian?" |
| |

"It is not you," answers Jason, "who once saved me, but love, and you have had from me more than you gave. I have brought you from a barbarous land to Greece, and in Greece you are esteemed for your wisdom. And without fame of what avail is treasure or even the gifts of the Muses? Moreover, it is not for love that I have promised to marry the princess, but to win wealth and power for myself and for my sons. Neither do I wish to send you away in need; take as ample a provision as you like, and I will recommend you to the care of my friends."
She refuses with scorn his base gifts, "Marry the maid if thou wilt; perchance full soon thou mayst rue thy nuptials."
Meantime, Aegeus, the ruler of Athens, arrives at Corinth from Delphi, Medea laments her fate to him and asks his aid; he swears that in Athens she shall find refuge. Now, reassured, she turns to vengeance. She has Jason summoned, and when he comes she begs for his forgiveness.
"Forgive what I said in anger! I will yield to the decree, and only beg one favor, that my children may stay. They shall take to the princess a costly robe and a golden crown, and pray for her protection."
The prayer is granted and the gifts accepted. But soon a messenger appears, announcing the result:
"Alas! The bride had died in horrible agony; for no sooner had she put on Medea's gifts than a devouring poison consumed her limbs as with fire, and in his endeavor to save his daughter the old father died too."
Nor is her vengeance by any means complete. She leads her two children to the house, and that no other may slay them in revenge, murders them herself. Very effective is this scene in which, after a soliloquy of agonizing doubt and hesitation, she resolves on this awful deed:
In vain, my children, have I brought you up,
Borne all the cares and pangs of motherhood,
And the sharp pains of childbirth undergone.
In you, alas, was treasured many a hope
Of loving sustentation in my age,
Of tender laying out when I was dead,
Such as all men might envy.
Those sweet thoughts are mine no more, for now bereft of you
I must wear out a drear and joyless life,
And you will nevermore your mother see,
Nor live as ye have done beneath her eye.
Alas, my sons, why do you gaze on me,
Why smile upon your mother that last smile?
Ah me! What shall I do? My purpose melts
Beneath the bright looks of my little ones.
I cannot do it. Farewell, my resolve,
I will bear off my children from this land.
Why should I seek to wring their father's heart,
When that same act will doubly wring my own?
I will not do it. Farewell, my resolve.
What has come o'er me? Shall I let my foes
Triumph, that I may let my friends go free?
I'll brace me to the deed. Base that I was
To let a thought of wickedness cross my soul.
Children, go home. Whoso accounts it wrong
To be attendant at my sacrifice,
Let him stand off; my purpose is unchanged.
Forego my resolutions, O my soul,
Force not the parent's hand to slay the child.
Their presence where we will go will gladden thee.
By the avengers that in Hades reign,
It never shall be said that I have left
My children for my foes to trample on.
It is decreed.
Jason, who has come to punish the murderess of his bride, hears that his children have perished too, and Medea herself appears to him in the chariot of the sun, bestowed by Helios, the sun-god, upon his descendants. She revels in the anguish of her faithless husband.
"I do not leave my children's bodies with thee; I take them with me that I may bury them in Hera's precinct. And for thee, who didst me all that evil, I prophesy an evil doom."
She flies to Aegeus at Athens, and the tragedy closes with the chorus:
Manifold are thy shapings, Providence!
Many a hopeless matter gods arrange.
What we expected never came to pass,
What we did not expect the gods brought to bear;
So have things gone, this whole experience through!"
This drama is a masterly presentment of passion in its secret folds and recesses. The suffering and sensitiveness of injured love are strongly drawn, and with the utmost nicety of observation, passing from one stage to another, until they culminate in the awful deed of vengeance. The mighty enchantress who is yet a weak woman is powerfully delineated. The touches of motherly tenderness are in the highest degree pathetic. The strife of emotions which passion engenders is admirably shown; and amid all the stress of their conflict, and amid all this sophistical and illusive commonplaces which work upon the soul, hate and vengeance win the day. Medea is criminal, but not without cause, and not without strength and dignity. Such an inner world of emotion is alien from the genius of the religious and soldier-like Aeschylus; Sophocles creates characters to act on one another, and endows them with qualities accordingly; Euripides opens a new world to art and gives us a nearer view of passionate emotion, both in its purest forms and in the wildest aberrations by which men are controlled, or troubled, or destroyed.
"The sure sign of the general decline of an art," says Macaulay, "is the frequent occurence, not of deformity, but of misplaced beauty. In general tragedy is corrupted by eloquence." This symptom is especially conspicuous in Euripides, who is constantly sacrificing propriety for rhetorical display; so that we are sometimes in doubt whether we are reading the lines of a poet or the speeches of an orator. Yet it is this very quality which has in all ages made him a much greater favorite than Aeschylus or Sophocles; it is this which made tragi-comedy so easy and natural under his treatment; which recommended him to Menander as the model for his new comedy, and to Quintilian as the model for oratory. In the middle ages he was far better known than his two great contemporaries; for this was an era when scholastic subtleties were mistaken for eloquence, minute distinctions for science, and verbal quibbles for proficiency in dramatic art. Pitiable also is his habit of punning, as in the Bacchae, where his Greek may be rendered, "Take heed lest Pentheus makes your mansion a pent-house of grief." Even Shakespeare, the most incorrigible of punsters, has nothing worse than this. Yet Aeschylus is fully as bad, speaking for instance of Helen in his Agamemnon as "a hell to men, a hell to ships and a hell to cities."
The Art of Euripides
The works of Euripides have been more variously judged than those of the other two great masters. His art, it has been said, is tamer than theirs, and his genius rhetorical rather than poetical, while the morality that he teaches belongs to the school of Sophists. On the other hand his admirers claim that he is the most tragic of the Greek tragedians, the most pathetic of the Attic poets, the most humane in his social philosophy and the most skillful in psychological insight. Doubtless he owed to Socrates the philosophy interwoven in his tragedies, causing him to be named the "stage philosopher," one haunted by the demon of Socrates. Though he did not live in the most stirring period of the nation's life, he was, both in spirit and in choice of themes, intensely patriotic, and to him is due the spread of dramatic literature more than to any other of the ancient bards. Tragedy followed in his footsteps in Greece and Rome; comedy owed him much, even in the style of Aristophanes, who ridiculed him, and in Menander, who borrowed his sentiments. When the modern drama grafted the classical element on its crude growth, the plays of Euripides were, directly or indirectly, the most powerful influence in the establishment of a living connection between them.
When Attica was given over to the invading army of Xerxes the women and children were transferred to the island of Salamis, and here, according to Plutarch and Suidas, Euripides was born on the day of the great victory. In the table known as the Parian marble his birth is given as a few years earlier, and some have placed it on the day of the battle of the Euripus, from which was formed his patronymic. His father, Mnesarchus, was a man of means and respectability; but his mother was probably of lowly origin--a seller of herbs, if we can believe Aristophanes, who treats the matter as one of public notoriety.
The Career of Euripides
It is related that his father was promised by the oracle a son who, honored by all men, should win great reputation and bind his brows with consecrated wreaths. Hence he was trained for an athlete and won some prizes at the public games; he was also known as a painter; but it was as a dramatist that he was destined to achieve enduring fame. He was well educated, attending the lectures of Anaxagoras, Prodicus and Protagoras, to whom he probably owed many of his sophistical and rhetorical mannerisms. He was on terms of intimacy with Pericles and Socrates, both of whom were his fellow-pupils. While taking a lively interest in the questions of the day, he lived a retired and somewhat misanthropic life, happy in the possession of a valuable library, and passing most of his time in dramatic composition. As Philochorus relates, most of his tragedies were composed in a dark cave in the isle of Salamis, which was an object of curiosity many years after his death.
Euripides was a voluminous writer, the number of his plays being variously stated at from seventy-five to ninety-two, including several satyric dramas. Of these nineteen have survived, with numerous fragments of others, though many of his best works have been lost and more have suffered from interpolations. He began his public career as a dramatist when twenty-four years of age, but was nearly twice as old when he gained his first decisive victory, winning the first prize only four times during his life and once after his death. Yet he was highly esteemed, not only in Athens but throughout the Hellenic world, and as Plutarch tells us, some of the Athenian captives, after the disaster of Syracuse, obtained their liberty by reciting passages from his dramas.
The last years of Euripides were passed in Magnesia and in Macedonia, where he was the guest of Archelaus, though the motive for his self-exile cannot be clearly ascertained. We know that Athens was not always the most favorable spot for eminent literary merit. The virulence of rivalry reigned unchecked in that fierce democracy, and the caprice of the petulant multitude would not afford the most satisfactory patronage to a high-minded and talented man. Report, too, insinuates that Euripides was unhappy in his own family. His first wife, Melito, he divorced for adultery; and in his second, Chaerila, he was not more fortunate. Envy and enmity among his fellow-citizens, infidelity and domestic vexations at home, would prove no small inducements for the poet to accept the invitation of Archelaus. In Macedonia he is said to have written a play in honor of that monarch, and to have inscribed it with his patron's name, who was so pleased with the manners and abilities of his guest as to appoint him one of his ministers. No further particulars are recorded of Euripides, except a few apocryphal letters, anecdotes and apophthegms. His death, which took place B.C. 406, if the popular account be true, was, like that of Aeschylus, in its nature extraordinary. Either from chance or malice, the aged dramatist was exposed to the attack of ferocious hounds, and by them so dreadfully mangled as to expire soon afterward, in his seventy-fifth year.
The Athenians entreated Archelaus to send the body to the poet's native city for interment. The request was refused; and, with every demonstration of grief and respect, Euripides was buried at Pella. A cenotaph, however, was erected to his memory at Athens.
Reputation
Euripides, in the estimation of the ancients, certainly held a rank much inferior to that of his two great rivals. The caustic wit of Aristophanes, whilst it fastens but slightly on the failings of the giant Aeschylus and keeps respectfully aloof from the calm dignity of Sophocles, assails with merciless malice every weak point in the genius, character and circumstances of Euripides. The comedian banters or reproaches him for lowering the dignity of tragedy, by exhibiting heroes as whining, tattered beggars; by introducing the vulgar affairs of ordinary life; by the sonorous platitudes of his choral odes; the voluptuous character of his music; the feebleness of his verses, and the loquacity of all his personages, however low their rank. He laughs at the monotonous construction of his clumsy prologues; he imputes to his dramas an immoral tendency, and to the poet himself contempt for the gods and a fondness for new-fangled doctrines. He jeers at his affectation of rhetoric and philosophy. In short he seems to regard Euripides with sovereign contempt, bordering upon disgust.
The attachment of Socrates and the admiration of Archelaus may perhaps serve as a counterpoise to the insinuations of Aristophanes against the personal character of Euripides. As to his poetic powers, there is a striking diversity of opinion between him and the later comedians, for Menander and Philemon held him in high esteem. Yet Aristotle, whilst allowing to Euripides a preëminence in the excitement of sorrowful emotion, censures the general arrangement of his pieces, the wanton degradation of his personages and the unconnected nature of his choruses. Longinus, like Aristotle, ascribes to Euripides a great power in working upon the feelings by depiction of love and madness, but he certainly did not entertain the highest opinion of the genius. He even classes him among those writers who, far from possessing originality of talent, strive to conceal the real meanness of their conceptions, and assume the appearance of sublimity by studied composition and labored language.
For the tragedians of later times Euripides was the absolute model and pattern, and equally so for the poets of the new comedy. Diphilus called him the "Golden Euripides," and Philemon went so far as to say, with some extravagance, "If the dead, as some assert, have really consciousness, then would I hang myself to see Euripides." He had warm admirers in Alexander the Great and the Stoic Chrysippus, who quoted him regularly in several of his works. Among the Romans, too, he was held in high esteem, serving as a model for tragedy, as did Menander and Phrynichus for comedy.
In his survey of the shades of departed poets, Dante makes no mention of Aeschylus or Sophocles, but classes Euripides and Agathon with the greatest of the Greeks. Those who are familiar with the literature of the middle ages can easily understand why the works of Euripides became so popular among the nations of Europe. The pupil and friend of the most eminent of the sophists who succeeded the rhapsodes of the Homeric age, he was himself a sophist, supplanting with his precepts the rhapsodical element in the Hellenic drama. He also gave to his audience some of the physical doctrines of his master, Anaxagoras, going out of his way to show that the sun is nothing but a great ignited stone, that the overflow of the Nile is caused by the melting of the snow in Ætheopia, and that the æther or sky is an embodiment of the diety.
Euripides was the first one to introduce women on the stage, not as heroines but as they are in actual life. Yet he is often far from complimentary to the other sex, the result, probably, of his two unhappy marriages. Thus, for instance, after a burst of indignation before the nurse, who approaches him with overtures of love on behalf of Phædra, he makes Hippolytus express his opinion of womankind:
O Zeus, why hast thou brought into the world
To plague us such a tricksy thing as woman?
If thou didst wish to propagate mankind,
Couldst thou not find some better way than this?
We to the temples might have brought our price
In gold or weight of iron or of brass,
And purchased offspring, each to the amount
Of that which he has paid; and so have dwelt
In quiet homes unvexed of womankind.
Now, to import a plague into our homes,
First of our substance we make sacrifice,
And here at once we see what woman is.
The father that begot her gladly pays
A dowry that he might be rid of her,
While he may bring this slip of evil home.
Fond man adorns with costly ornament
A worthless idol, and his living wastes
To trick her out in costly finery.
Ha has no choice. Are his connections good,
To keep them he must keep a hated wife;
Are his connections bad, he can but weigh
Against that evil a good bedfellow.
His is the easiest lot who has to wife
A cipher, a good-natured simpleton;
Quick wits are hateful. Ne'er may wife of mine
Be wiser than consorts with womanhood.
In your quick-witted dames the power of love
More wickedness engenders; while the dull
Are by their dullness saved from going wrong.
This is sufficiently bitter, but nor more so than the words which Euripides is accustomed to use when speaking of women.
In the time of Euripides the Attic drama reached the zenith of its glory, when the works of the great classic triad--Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides--followed each other in rapid succession.
It is impossible rightly to understand Euripides without due consideration of the period to which he belonged. Even the clearest thinker cannot escape the influence of his age; how much less, then, can the poet, who draws from it the inspiration for his creations and in return marks it with the impress of his genius? Aeschylus, the veteran of Marathon, is the dramatist of the Athenian heroic age. Sophocles reflects in his noble creations the cultured spirit of the age of Pericles, and transmits it in its purity to succeeding times. Euripides is the dramatist of the Peloponnesian war and the Ochlocracy or mob-government. In the course of this period, however, was completed a mighty revolution throughout Greece in every relation of life. It was at this time that the spirit of Greece first began, in its focus at Athens, to free itself from the good old traditions in matters of state, custom and religious feeling. Pericles had established a pure democracy; he had invited the whole body of citizens to liberty and intellectual culture. But with his death liberty degenerated into license, and culture, spreading among a wider circle, soon became superficial. With the change from democracy to ochlocracy public life lost its dignity more and more, and the deterioration of morals struck still deeper into all the relations of family life.
The noble struggle against the Persians for freedom and fatherland had raised the Greeks both politically and morally; on the other hand, the Peloponnesian war, waged by Greek against Greek, little by little, like some foul cancer, drew away the whole strength of the body, and finally led to its general dissolution. All feeling for true greatness and nobility was lost, and moral insensibility decked itself with their empty names. At Athens men's minds were filled with a restless desire and striving after novelty. The less the results of Athenian politics came up to their conception of the greatness of sovereign demos, the more did men question the existing principles of public duty and morality, hitherto regarded as fundamental. A new age produced a new race, frivolous and artificial, without mental balance, doomed to intellectual blindness, and guided in its political aims by the most unreasoning selfishness. The more cultivated sort tried, by means of political trials, party strife, proscription of the rich, litigious wrangling and a truly democratic mistrust of all existing institutions, to stifle the inner unrest of their minds and to escape the dark influence of a period which was ever growing more gloomy. In this way they lost all capacity for simple pleasures; faith in the old gods quickly vanished, and with it the moral significance of the religious myths. Its place was taken in some minds by a dreary superstition, in others by an unsound intellectualism.
Loss of faith in the gods involved a similar loss of faith in the divine in man; this was followed by a gross materialism, which found its greatest happiness in enjoyment, its greatest pain in self-denial. Family ties became laxer; loose connections tolerated, though not approved by public opinion, destroyed the sanctity of the marriage bond. All faith in woman's dignity and virtue disappeared, and men avenged by hatred and scorn the indignity they had themselves inflicted on the weaker sex. The hetæræ, who had once been, as they were called, "companions," had become mere mercenaries; and they bore much the same relation to Aspasia of Miletus, whom Pericles had made his consort, as Phæax and Hyperbolus did to that statesman himself. A certain general culture, consisting mainly in mere cleverness of style and rhetoric, and derived chiefly from the sophists, aggravated the universal confusion and instability of mind by the deceptive appearance of solidity. From these blighting influences even the better natures, men morally and mentally superior to their fellows, could not wholly escape.
The Themes of Medea

Medea, a play by the Greek playwright Euripides, explores the

Greek-barbarian dichotomy through the character of Medea, a princess

from the "barbarian", or non-Greek, land of Colchis. Throughout the

play, it becomes evident to the reader that Medea is no ordinary woman

by Greek standards. Central to the whole plot is Medea's barbarian

origins and how they are related to her actions. In this paper, I am

attempting to answer questions such as how Medea behaves like a female,

how she acts heroically from a male point of view, why she killed her

children, if she could have achieved her goal without killing them, if

the murder was motivated by her barbarian origins, and how she deals

with the pain of killing her children.

As an introduction to the play, the status of women in Greek society

should be briefly discussed. In general, women had very few rights. In

the eyes of men, the main purposes of women in Greek society were to do

housework such as cooking and cleaning, and bear children. They could

not vote, own property, or choose a husband, and had to be represented

by men in all legal proceedings. In some ways, these Greek women were

almost like slaves. There is a definite relationship between this

subordination of women and what transpires in the play. Jason decides

that he wants to divorce Medea and marry the princess of Corinth,

casting Medea aside as if they had never been married. This sort of

activity was acceptable by Greek standards, and shows the subordinate

status of the woman, who had no say in any matter like this.

Even though some of Medea's actions were not typical of the average

Greek woman, she still had attitudes and emotions common among women.

For instance, Medea speaks out against women's status in society,

proclaiming that they have no choice of whom to marry, and that a man

can rid themselves of a woman to get another whenever he wants, but a

woman always has to "keep [her] eyes on one alone." (231-247) Though it

is improbable that women went around openly saying things of this

nature, it is likely that this attitude was shared by most or all Greek

women. Later in the play, Medea debates with herself over whether or

not to kill her children: "Poor heart, let them go, have pity upon the

children." (1057). This shows Medea's motherly instincts in that she

cares about her children. She struggles to decide if she can accomplish

her goal of revenge against Jason without killing her children because

she cares for them and knows they had no part in what their father did.

Unfortunately, Medea's desire to exact revenge on Jason is greater than

her love for her children, and at the end of the play she kills them.

Medea was also a faithful wife to Jason. She talks about how she helped

Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece, then helped him escape, even

killing her own brother. (476-483). The fact that she was willing to

betray her own family to be with Jason shows her loyalty to him.

Therefore, her anger at Jason over him divorcing her is understandable.

On the other hand, Medea shows some heroic qualities that were not

common among Greek women. For example, Medea is willing to kill her own

brother to be with Jason. In classical Greece, women and killing were

probably not commonly linked. When she kills her brother, she shows

that she is willing to do what is necessary to "get the job done", in

this case, to be with Jason. Secondly, she shows the courage to stand

up to Jason. She believes that she has been cheated and betrayed by

him. By planning ways to get back at him for cheating on her, she is

standing up for what she believes, which in this case is that she was

wronged by Jason, but in a larger sense, she is speaking out against the

inferior status of women, which effectively allows Jason to discard

Medea at will. Third, she shows that she is clever and resourceful.

Rather than use physical force to accomplish her plans, she uses her

mind instead: "it is best to...make away with them by poison."

(384-385) While physical strength can be considered a heroic quality,

cleverness can be as well. She does in fact poison the princess and the

king of Corinth; interestingly, however, she does not poison them

directly. "I will send the children with gifts...to the bride...and if

she wears them upon her skin...she will die." (784-788) This shows her

cleverness because she is trying to keep from being linked to the crime,

though everyone is able to figure out that she was responsible anyway.

In a way, though, she is almost anti-heroic because she is not doing the

"dirty work" herself, which makes her appear somewhat cowardly.

Finally, there is the revenge factor. Many times heroes were out for

revenge against someone who did them or a friend wrong, and in this case

Medea is no exception, since she wants to have revenge against Jason for

divorcing her without just cause.

There are two main reasons why Medea decides to kill her children. The

first, and more obvious one, is that she feels that it is a perfect way

to complement the death of the princess in getting revenge on Jason.

When she tells the chorus of the plans to kill the children, they wonder

if she has the heart to kill her children, to which she replies, "[y]es,

for this is the best way to wound my husband." (817). This shows that

she believes that by killing her children, she will basically ruin

Jason's life, effectively getting her revenge. The second reason for

Medea killing her children has nothing to do with revenge. If she left

her children with Jason, they would be living in a society that would

look down upon them since they have partly barbarian origins. She did

not want her children to have to suffer through that. Also, if her

children are mocked for being outsiders, then this reflects badly on

Medea, and she said that she does not want to give her enemies any

reason to laugh at her. (781-782) Since she does not want to leave her

children with Jason, they really have no place else to where they could

go, being barbarians in a Greek city: "[m]y children, there is none who

can give them safety." (793) For these two reasons, Medea decides that

killing her children is the best way to accomplish her plan: getting

revenge and keeping her children away from Jason.

Whether or not Medea could have accomplished her goal without killing

her children is debatable. On one hand, if we look at Medea's objective

only as seeking revenge against Jason, then she could have accomplished

that without killing her children. Killing the princess, Jason's new

wife, would cause enough grief for Jason so that her goal would be

accomplished. We can infer that the death of Jason's wife would be more

damaging to him than the deaths of his children because Jason was going

to let Medea take the children with her into exile and did not try to

keep them for himself. Therefore, once the princess was dead, killing

the children, while it causes additional grief for Jason, really is not

necessary. Even though Medea does not seem to believe it, killing her

children probably causes more pain for her than Jason. She just does

not see it because she is so bent on revenge against Jason. On the

other hand, if we define Medea's objective in two parts, one being

revenge, and the other to keep the children away, then it is possible

that she had to kill her children. As for the revenge part, it was not

necessary that she kill her children for the reasons just discussed.

However, she may have needed to kill them to keep Jason from getting

them. If Jason decided he wanted his children, there is not much Medea

could do about it, other than kill them. Also, it is possible that she

did not want to take them with her into exile because they could make it

more difficult for her to reach Athens. For whatever the reason,

however, it is probable that she needed to kill her children to carry

out her plan, since she accomplished two different goals through their

deaths.

The murder of Medea's children is certainly caused in part by her

barbarian origins. The main reason that Jason decides to divorce Medea

to marry the princess is that he will have a higher status and more

material wealth being married to the king's daughter. (553-554) In

other words, Jason believes that Medea's barbarian origins are a burden

to him, because there is a stigma attached to that. In his mind, having

the chance to be rich outweighs the love of a barbarian wife. Medea's

barbarian status is a burden to herself as well. Once separated from

Jason, she becomes an outsider with no place to go, because the

barbarians were not thought too highly of in Greek society. Had Medea

not been a barbarian, it is likely that Jason would not have divorced

her, and therefore, she would not have had to kill her children. But

since she is a barbarian, this sets in motion the events of the play,

and in her mind the best course of action is to kill her children. Just

because she is non-Greek does not necessarily mean that her way of

thinking would be different from the Greeks; in other words, her way of

thinking did not necessarily cause her to kill her children.

Medea deals with the pain that the deaths of her children cause her

quite well. She does this by convincing herself that her revenge

against her husband was worth the price of her children's death. When

asked about killing her children, she replies, "So it must be. No

compromise is possible." (819) This shows that she is bent on revenge,

and that she is justifying their deaths to get her revenge. However,

she does struggle with her decision to kill them. She is sad that she

must take their lives, but also tells herself that it is in their best

interests, as evidenced by what she says to her children: "I wish you

happiness, but not in this world." (1073) She does not seem to have a

problem with killing her children once it comes time to actually carry

out the act. But her motherly instincts will not allow her to totally

abandon her children after they are dead, as she decides to hold a

yearly feast and sacrifice at their burial site. (1383-1384) But in

the end, we can see that she dealt with the pain surprisingly well.

Two main themes are present in Medea: Medea's barbarian origins, and

her desire for revenge against Jason. Her barbarian status is really

what starts the actions of the play. It is what makes her a less

desirable wife to Jason than the princess, and causes him to leave her.

This then leads to her thoughts of revenge against Jason, and her

decision to kill her children as a way to exact that revenge. As far as

revenge goes, Medea is heroic in that she is standing up against an evil

done to her. Throughout most of the play, she spends her time plotting

her revenge against Jason, waiting until the right moment to unleash her

plan. She uses her cleverness to trick Jason and the others into

believing that she was not upset with him. In the end, we can see that

Medea's barbarian origins were a major factor in the play, and that

Medea was no ordinary woman in Greek terms.

In Italy he is known as "the Supreme Poet" (il Sommo Poeta) or just il Poeta. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also known as "the three fountains" or "the three crowns". Dante is also called the "Father of the Italian language".
The exact date of Dante's birth is not known, although it is generally believed to be around 1265. This can be deduced from autobiographic allusions in La Divina Commedia, "the Inferno" (Halfway through the journey we are living, implying that Dante was around 35 years old, as the average lifespan according to the Bible (Psalms 89:10, Vulgate) is 70 years, and as the imaginary travel took place in 1300 Dante must have been born around 1265). Some verses of the Paradiso section of the Divine Comedy also provide a possible clue that he was born under the sign of Gemini—"As I revolved with the eternal twins, I saw revealed from hills to river outlets, the threshing-floor that makes us so ferocious", (XXII 151-154), but these cannot be considered definitive statements by Dante about his birth. However, in 1265 the Sun was in Gemini approximately during the period 11 May to 11 June. His birth date is listed as "probably in the end of May" by Robert Hollander in "Dante" in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, volume 4. In summary, most students of Dante's life believe that he was born between about the middle of May and about the middle of June 1265, but there is little likelihood a definite date will ever be known.

Dante claimed that his family descended from the ancient Romans (Inferno, XV, 76), but the earliest relative he could mention by name was Cacciaguida degli Elisei (Paradiso, XV, 135), of no earlier than about 1100. Dante's father, Alighiero di Bellincione, was a White Guelph who suffered no reprisals after the Ghibellines won the Battle of Montaperti in the mid 13th century. This suggests that Alighiero or his family enjoyed some protective prestige and status.
Dante's family was prominent in Florence, with loyalties to the Guelphs, a political alliance that supported the Papacy and which was involved in complex opposition to the Ghibellines, who were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor. The poet's mother was Bella degli Abati. She died when Dante was not yet ten years old, and Alighiero soon married again, to Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. It is uncertain whether he really married her, as widowers had social limitations in these matters. This woman definitely bore two children, Dante's brother Francesco and sister Tana (Gaetana). When Dante was 12, he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, daughter of Messer (Sir) Manetto Donati. Contracting marriages at this early age was quite common and involved a formal ceremony, including contracts signed before a notary. Dante had already fallen in love with another woman, Beatrice Portinari (known also as Bice). Years after his marriage to Gemma, he met Beatrice again. He had become interested in writing verse, and although he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice, he never mentioned his wife Gemma in any of his poems.
Dante on the Italian €2.00 coin based on a portrait by Raphael
Dante fought in the front rank of the Guelph cavalry at the battle of Campaldino (June 11, 1289). This victory brought forth a reformation of the Florentine constitution. To take any part in public life, one had to be enrolled in one of "the arts". So Dante entered the guild of physicians and apothecaries. In following years, his name is frequently found recorded as speaking or voting in the various councils of the republic.
Dante had several children with Gemma. As often happens with significant figures, many people subsequently claimed to be Dante's offspring; however, it is likely that Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni and Antonia were truly his children. Antonia became a nun with the name of Sister Beatrice.
Not much is known about Dante's education, and it is presumed he studied at home. It is known that he studied Tuscan poetry, at a time when the Sicilian School (Scuola poetica Siciliana), a cultural group from Sicily, was becoming known in Tuscany. His interests brought him to discover the Occitan poetry of the troubadours and the Latin poetry of classical antiquity (with a particular devotion to Virgil).
During the "Secoli Bui" (Dark Ages), Italy had become a mosaic of small states, Sicily being the largest one, at the time under Angevin rule, and as far (culturally and politically) from Tuscany as Occitania was: the regions did not share a language,[citation needed] culture or easy communications. Nevertheless, we can assume that Dante was a keen up-to-date intellectual with international interests.
When he was nine years old he met Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari, with whom he fell in love "at first sight", and apparently without even having spoken to her. He saw her frequently after age 18, often exchanging greetings in the street, but he never knew her well; he effectively set the example for the so-called "courtly love". It is hard now to understand what this love actually consisted of, but something extremely important was happening within Italian culture. It was in the name of this love that Dante gave his imprint to the "Dolce Stil Novo" (Sweet New Style) and would lead poets and writers to discover the themes of Love (Amore), which had never been so emphasized before. Love for Beatrice (as in a different manner Petrarch would show for his Laura) would apparently be the reason for poetry and for living, together with political passions. In many of his poems, she is depicted as semi-divine, watching over him constantly. When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante tried to find a refuge in Latin literature. The Convivio reveals that he had read Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae and Cicero's De amicitia. He then dedicated himself to philosophical studies at religious schools like the Dominican one in Santa Maria Novella. He took part in the disputes that the two principal mendicant orders (Franciscan and Dominican) publicly or indirectly held in Florence, the former explaining the doctrine of the mystics and of Saint Bonaventure, the latter presenting Saint Thomas Aquinas' theories.
At 18, Dante met Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia and soon after Brunetto Latini; together they became the leaders of the Dolce Stil Novo. Brunetto later received a special mention in the Divine Comedy (Inferno, XV, 28), for what he had taught Dante. Nor speaking less on that account, I go With Ser Brunetto, and I ask who are His most known and most eminent companions. Some fifty poetical components by Dante are known (the so-called Rime, rhymes), others being included in the later Vita Nuova and Convivio. Other studies are reported, or deduced from Vita Nuova or the Comedy, regarding painting and music.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) & Beatrice Portinari (1266-1290)
|Dante and Beatrice first met in Florence when he was nearly nine years old (1274) and she was just turned eight. She was dressed in soft |
|crimson and wore a girdle about her waist. Dante fell in love with her at first sight and thought of her as angelic with divine and noble |
|qualities. He frequented places where he could catch a glimpse of her, but she never spoke to him until nine years later. Then one afternoon |
|(1283) he saw her dressed in white, walking down a street in Florence. Accompanied by two older women, Beatrice turned and greeted him. Her |
|greeting filled him with such joy that he retreated to his room to think about her. Falling asleep, he had a dream that became the subject of |
|the first sonnet in his La Vita Nuova, one of the world's greatest romantic poems. The above Rossetti print depicts scenes from La Vita Nuova |
|III where Beatrice first greeted Dante, and Purgatorio XXX when Beatrice meets Dante in Eden “with a white veil and a wreath of olive.” Three |
|chapters from La Vita Nuova are quoted below: |
|When exactly nine years had passed since this gracious being appeared to me, as I have described, it happened that on the last day of this |
|intervening period this marvel appeared before me again, dressed in purest white, walking between two other women of distinguished bearing, |
|both older than herself. As they walked down the street she turned her eyes toward me where I stood in fear and trembling, and with her |
|ineffable courtesy, which is now rewarded in eternal life, she greeted me; and such was the virtue of her greeting that I seemed to experience|
|the height of bliss. It was exactly the ninth hour of day when she gave me her sweet greeting. As this was the first time she had ever spoken |
|to me, I was filled with such joy that, my senses reeling, I had to withdraw from the sight of others. So I returned to the loneliness of my |
|room and began to think about this gracious person. (La Vita Nuova III) |
|Whenever and wherever she appeared, in the hope of receiving her miraculous salutation I felt I had not an enemy in the world. Indeed, I |
|glowed with a flame of charity which moved me to forgive all who had ever injured me; and if at that moment someone had asked me a question, |
|about anything, my only reply would have been: ‘Love’, with a countenance clothed with humility. When she was on the point of bestowing her |
|greeting, a spirit of love, destroying all the other spirits of the senses, drove away the frail spirits of vision and said: ‘Go and pay |
|homage to your lady’; and Love himself remained in their place. Anyone wanting to behold Love could have done so then by watching the |
|quivering of my eyes. And when this most gracious being actually bestowed the saving power of her salutation, I do not say that Love as an |
|intermediary could dim for me such unendurable bliss but, almost by excess of sweetness, his influence was such that my body, which was then |
|utterly given over to his governance, often moved like a heavy, inanimate object. So it is plain that in her greeting resided all my joy, |
|which often exceeded and overflowed my capacity. (La Vita Nuova XI) |
|After this sonnet there appeared to me a marvellous vision in which I saw things which made me decide to write no more of this blessed one |
|until I could do so more worthily. And to this end I apply myself as much as I can, as she indeed knows. Thus, if it shall please Him by whom |
|all things live that my life continue for a few years, I hope to compose concerning her what has never been written in rhyme of any woman. And|
|then may it please Him who is the Lord of courtesy that my soul may go to see the glory of my lady, that is of the blessed Beatrice, who now |
|in glory beholds the face of Him who is blessed forever. |
|— Dante, La Vita Nuova XLII (1290), translated by Barbara Reynolds (1969) |
|Dante completed La Vita Nuova (1294) when he was 29 years old. Yet he felt that his love sonnets still did not do justice to honor the beauty |
|and blessedness of his dear Beatrice. So he vowed to write a poem to honor his beloved that has never been written of any woman. Dante |
|fulfilled this promise 27 years later just before his death, when he finished La Commedia (1321)— the greatest love poem about the soul's |
|ascent from Inferno to Purgatory to Paradise. What's insightful about this journey is that the poet Virgil took Dante only up to the heights |
|of Mount Purgatory. From that point onward, only Beatrice could guide Dante to Paradise. Here Dante would learn about universal gravitation as|
|he flies through the heavenly spheres, sharing with us his celestial vision, and concluding Paradiso with “ by Love that moves the sun, the |
|moon, and the other stars.” I find it fascinating that Goethe echoed Dante's vision with “Eternal Feminine, leads us above” when he concluded |
|his epic drama Faust just before his death (1832). Lao Tzu also advises us “to cling to the feminine” in the Tao Te Ching XXVIII (6th century |
|B.C.). Perhaps the male principle (yang or animus) as represented by Virgil or logic could take our intellect only so far, and we need to |
|harness the feminine principle (yin or anima) as represented by Beatrice or intuition to penetrate the realm beyond space-time so we could |
|experience the transcendence and blessedness of paradise. |
|When I started this web site WisdomPortal.com, my vision was to share the best works of art, music, poetry, and philosophy that will lift our |
|mind and spirit to cosmic consciousness, spiritual awareness, and enlightenment. Images of enlightened masters and sages usually show a single|
|person in meditation, alone in a cave, desert, or mountain. On the other hand, images of romance show couples embracing, dancing, kissing, |
|closely together. At first glance, romance and enlightenment appear exclusive of each other— the first mostly physical and emotional, the |
|second mostly mental and emotionless. But the path of romance need not be stuck on the lower three chakras (energy centers of survival, sex, |
|and food). If we learn to rise to the fourth chakra (heart), true love enters and we become compassionate to all sentient beings. Dante's love|
|for Beatrice enables him to glow “with a flame of charity” (La Vita Nuova XI). From here on, his spirit would rise to the fifth chakra |
|(throat)— the voice of poetry, then ascend to the sixth chakra (third eye)— celestial vision, and finally soar to the seventh chakra |
|(thousand-petal lotus)— spiritual awakening and bliss. The spirit of romance is also a valid path to enlightenment. Romeo of Villeneuve has |
|done it when he tutored and married all of Count Beranger's four daughters to kings, then walked away from his glory to become a lonely |
|beggar-pilgrim again. Dante Alighieri has done it when his love for Beatrice enabled him to experience the soul's ascent to paradise, then |
|toiled to write The Divine Comedy for us to drink. May we be worthy of these celestial gifts when we bestow our heart on those whom we love. |

Meghadūta (Sanskrit in Devanagari: मेघदूत literally "cloud messenger") is a lyric poem written by Kālidāsa, considered to be one of the greatest Sanskrit poets.
A short poem of only 111 stanzas, it is one of Kālidāsa's most famous works. It recounts how a yakṣa, a subject of King Kubera (the god of wealth) after being exiled for a year to Central India for some unknown transgression, convinces a passing cloud to take a message to his wife on Mount Kailāsa in the Himālaya mountains. The yakṣa accomplishes this by describing the many beautiful sights the cloud will see on its northward course to the city of Alakā, where his wife awaits his return.
In 1813, the poem was first translated into English by Horace Hayman Wilson. An excerpt is quoted in Canadian director Deepa Mehta's film, Water.
The poem was also the inspiration for Gustav Holst's 'The Cloud Messenger Op. 30' (1909-10).
In classical sanskrit literature the Meghaduta is considered as "a priceless lyrical gem" (Kale). Meghaduta relates the story of a Yaksha (Yakshas are superhuman beings who are the servants of Kubera, the god of wealth- Kubera is also called Yaksheswara -. They guard Kubera's gardens and wealth "Yakshyate Pujyate iti Yakshaha"), who is living in exile on the mountains of Ramagiri and on seeing a cloud sends a message of his love to his beloved wife, whom he had to leave behind in the city of Alaka. Because the cloud is asked here to bear the important message of love, this lyrical work is titled, the Meghaduta - the cloud messenger.
There are three main reasons why I like, particularly, this work of Kalidasa: (1) The greatness of Kalidasa as a san-skrit poet is evident in each and every verse of this work in the way the beauty of the sankrit language is made evident. (2) His love of nature, his profound imagination, his deep un-derstanding of human heart and his capacity to interweave the beauty of flora and fauna with human emotions impart each verse of Meghaduta a haunting beauty. It is as if each verse is a miniature painting in itself. (3) Both history and mythology come alive in Kalidasa's lyrics. By using just a couple of words, Kalidasa recreates for his reader well known stories from Indian mythology. It is as if with the excuse of writing the lyrical work Meghaduta, Kalidasa wanted to immor-talize various places and scenes, which he had once known and which he had come to love (Kale).
All the above mentioned points are evident in the very first verse of Meghaduta in which it looks as if each single word was very carefully chosen and aptly used
Kalidasa writes of a certain, "Kashchit", Yaksha and does not name him, because it does not matter who this Yaksha is and what he is called. The identification of the Yaksha is not central to the story of Meghaduta. As was described earlier, Yaksha is a superhuman being. This particular Yaksha committed a mistake, ( again Kalidasa does not explain what mistake he committed because it is not important to know that) , and so was cursed and banished for a year by his master, "Bhartru", Kubera. This curse, this banishment, was all the more diffi-cult to bear for the Yaksha because he was thus separated from his beloved one, "Kanta". Kalidasa uses the word "Kanta" mean-ing a lady of superior qualities, and does not use just any other word like "Bharya" for wife, and by choosing this par-ticular word he shows the high regard the Yaksha had for his wife and the depth of his love for her. It is also important to know that, that Kubera cursed this Yaksha, because, this curse, "Shapa", made the Yaksha loose all his supernatural powers. So he could not, for example, become invisible and visit his beloved wife whom he had to leave behind. The Yaksha spends this period of exile in the hermitages on the mountain Ramagiri. The plural usage is emphasised here when the word hermitages "Ashrameshu", is used as it shows that due to the separation from his beloved the Yaksha was so restless that he could not live in peace in one place but wandered from her-mitage to hermitage. Kalidasa recreates the early part of the epic Ramayana when he uses the words "janakatanayas-nanapunyodakeshu", which mean that the waters were made holy by the bathing of the daughter of Janaka in them. One can see the young Sita bathing in the waters flowing on this mountain. Sita is there because she along with Lakshmana has accompanied Rama when he was exiled to live in the forests for 14 years according to the wishes of the queen Kaikeyi, the step mother of Rama. It also comes across that Rama and Sita are the Inkarnations of the great god Vishnu and his consort Lakshmi, because just by bathing in the waters, Sita, the daughter of Janaka has made them holy. Kalidasa's referring to the trees which cast a pleasing and rich shade emphasises this mood. In Valmiki Ramayana, it is written that when Rama, Lakshmana and Sita left the city of Ayodhya, to go live for fourteen years in the forest, the entire kingdom of Kosala was plunged in sorrow. Valmiki writes that not only did the people of Kosala were very sad, but that also the flowers wilted, the ponds and lakes dried up, and the trees along with their leaves and buds dried up. In contrast to this, the trees in the forests to which Rama went to live, must have burst into life to cast a deep and pleasing shade, so that Rama, Laksmana and Sita do not have to suffer very much in the sun.
At the opening of the story, the Yaksha has already spent eight months in banishment and as said earlier is suffering greatly from being separated from his beloved wife, whom he had to leave behind in the city of Alaka. He now sees, on the first of the month of Ashadha, the first month of the rainy season, a big dark cloud hovering near the tips of the moun-tain. The Yaksha begs this cloud to carry a message of his love to his beloved wife in Alaka. Apart from a couple of verses at the beginning, Meghaduta is made up of the address of the Yaksha to the cloud. Even the fact that a mere cloud is chosen to be the messenger of love here is made deliberately to show the depth of love between the Yaksha and his wife. Afterall, as Kalidasa says, what does a cloud, a mixture of vapour, flame, water and wind, have to do with a message? Kalidasa himself provides an answer saying "Kamarta hi prakrutikrupanaaschetanaachetaneshu", in his eagerness, the Yaksha, because he was sick with desire, naturally couldnot distinguish between animate and inanimate objects (# 5).
Meghaduta is traditionally divided into two parts: the Purvamegha and the Uttaramegha. The first part of Meghaduta, called the Purvamegha, is mainly the description of the route which the Yaksha asks the cloud to take to reach Alaka. He de-scribes the landscapes, cities, rivers, and mountains, over which the cloud must pass to reach Alaka. Kalidasa makes the scenary come alive by his description of the nature and of the life led in these cities. Trees, flowers, birds, animals play roles equally important as the human beings dwelling there in making these places beauti-ful and immortal. The cloud is im-plored to visit the mountain Amarakuta (Amarakantaka), to soar over the heights of the Vindhya range, to greet the river Nar-mada, to stop at the capital city Vidisha and after tasting the waters of the river Vetravati (Vetava) to rest on the hills of Nichais, and so on.. He is asked to pause and rest on the mountains whenever he is tired and to drink water from the fine rivers whenever he is worn out (# 13). That love is the main theme of Meghaduta is stressed by dwelling on descriptions of the play between the cloud and the rivers, the cloud and the birds like Krouncha, the cloud and the flowers like Lotus, and ofcourse, the cloud and the many lovely girls it would meet on the way. In this section there is a beautiful poem (# 26), re-ally, a lyrical miniature painting. It says:
"After having rested, continue further, sprinkling drops of fresh water on the buds of jasmines in the gardens lining the banks of the river Vananadi, there coming into contact, atleast for a moment, by giving shade, with the faces of the girls who are plucking the jasmine buds, the lotus flowers in whose ears are fading away because they are getting injured when the girls accidently touch them, while they brush the drops of perspiration from their cheeks "
Well, if ever any poet wrote a verse, which is really a miniature painting, for me, it is the above poem.
Both history and mythology come alive in Kalidasa's lyrics. For example, the Yaksha asks the cloud to make a de-tour and visit the beautiful city of Ujjaini, the city of the king Udayana. Many verses are filled with picturesque de-scriptions of this beloved city of Kalidasa, whom he consid-ered as a lovely piece of heaven brought down to earth.. The Yaksha implores the cloud to visit the city of Devagiri to pay respect to the war god, Skanda, the son of Shiva, who is actu-ally nothing but the very energy, brighter than even the sun, of the one who bears the new moon, "Navashashibhruta" i.e.,of Shiva himself (# 43) . The story of the epic Mahabharata is re-called when the cloud is asked to pass over the site of the famous battle where Arjuna rained down his sharp arrows on the chests of the Kaurava warriors just like the cloud itself which showers its water on the lotus flowers (# 48):
It should be noted here that the main mood of Mahab-haratha, which is heroism is not stressed upon here by Kalidasa. Heroism has nothing to do with the subject matter of Meghaduta.
The cloud then should follow the river Ganga to her birth place, the Himalaya mountains. It is asked to enjoy several natural wonders of the mighty mountains and then to proceed northwards till it comes to the peaks of Kailasa, which is considered to be the home of the great god Shiva and also the place where the city of Alaka is situated. The profound poeti-cal imagination of Kalidasa which gives his verses the beauty of miniature paintings is again evident in the following verse (# 60):
"And if Gowri, her hand held by Shiva who had tossed aside his bracelet of snakes should go for a walk on these mountains you should, stopping your waters from flowing, form for her a flight of steps and go before her as she climbs its jeweled slopes."
The love between Gowri and Shiva is subtly hinted at here. Kalidasa refers to Gowri as "Bhiru" here, meaning one who would get scared. Gowri would get scared to hold the hands of Shiva if he wears his customary bracelet of snakes. Realis-ing this, Shiva would cast it aside as he takes her hand if she should wish to go for stroll on the mountains of Kailasa.
Here on the peaks of the mountain Kailasa, the cloud will finally arrive at the city of Alaka.
In the second section of Meghaduta, called the Uttaramegha, the Yaksha describes to the cloud, his beloved city of Alaka. (Alati bhushayati iti alaka; The city is called Alaka because of its grandeur. It is also called Vasundhara, vasusthali, Prabha a ) He pictures a city where normally no sorrow is known and where tears flow only for joy, where grief comes only because of separation from a beloved one and where separation is caused only because of love-quarrels. He talks of a city whose mansions are rinsed by the moonlight shed by the brows of Shiva, whose home is a grove lying outside Alaka -"Bahyodyana Sthithaharashirachandrikabhowtaharmya". The verse 64 in which the Yaksha talks of a city where the man-sions are comparable to the majesty of the cloud itself is a tribute to Kalidasa's power of finding similes. It says:
The Yaksha directs the cloud the way to his house in this city of wealth, where jewels studded with precious stones are so shining that they illuminate the houses. The verses 72 to 77 in which the Yaksha describes his mansion, and talks fondly about the land-marks - like the pool with emerald steps full of golden lotus flowers, the red ashoka tree which longs, like the Yaksha himself, for a little nudge by the left foot of the lovely lady, "Ekaha sakhyastava saha maya vamapadabhilashi", (the asoka tree is supposed to burst into flowers when it is kicked by beautiful ladies), the golden perch on which alights the peacock, the dear friend of his beloved wife, the peacock which dances to the music of the bangles worn by her as she claps her hand - by which it can recognise the proper house are some of the beautiful ones in Meghaduta. The most heart rending verses are ofcourse those in which the Yaksha de-scribes his beloved wife and the state in which she is, on be-ing separated from him. He talks of how the cloud may find her (# 83) sitting down with a Veena in her lap trying to sing a song which she herself composed weaving the name of her beloved into the words of the composition, how eventhough, she somehow gets the Veena tuned though its strings get damp with tears flowing unchecked from her eyes, she cannot really sing the song because in her sorrow she has forgotten the tune which she herself had composed
The Yaksha says ( # 87) that the cloud may also find that the night is being punctuated by the sighs of his beloved girl while she longs for sleep so that they could hold each other atleast in dreams, but even which will be denied to her be-cause the flood of tears pouring on her cheeks clog the pas-sage of sleep. If the cloud does indeed find her sleeping, im-plores the Yaksha of the cloud, it should not wake her up be-cause its thunder may scare her, but should rather wait a while and wake her up with a soft breeze cooled by its dew, (Shietalenaanilena). The cloud should gently deliver the mes-sage sent by the Yaksha which describes his longing for her and which swears of his eternal love for her.
By addressing her as "avidhava", one who is not a widow, the cloud will immediately be conveying to her that her hus-band is safe. It also explains why it has come to her, by telling her that it is a close friend of her husband and it has come carrying his messages for her.
Only when it has thus won the attention of the lonely girl should it continue to describe the eternal love of the Yaksha for her. It should describe how the Yaksha sees her limbs in the creepers on the mountain, her glances in the startled looks of a doe, the loveliness of her face in the moon, the beauty of her cascading hair in the plumage of the peacock, the playful lift of her eyebrows in the gentle rip-ples of the river but how to his great sorrow, he cannot find the whole of her likeness anywhere (# 101).
The cloud should convey to her how the Yaksha drew a pic-ture of her pretending anger, with a red rock on a stone slab, and how his wish to draw a portrait of himself falling at her feet was not fulfilled, over and over again, with his eyes being clouded over by tears (# 102). Though sorrow is tearing his heart apart, the Yaksha still maintains a glimpse of positive thinking and asks the cloud to tell his wife not to give herself away to too much grief; because,
Kasyatyantam sukhamupanatam dukhamekantato va neechairgachatyupari cha dasha chakranemikramena
"Whose life is all pleasure or always pain? Luck goes un-der and up like the rim of a rolling wheel."
(# 106)
The Yaksha asking the cloud to wander away where it will after assuring the lovely girl that their separation will soon be over, pronounces a blessing over the cloud saying (# 111)
Ma bhurdevam kshanamapi cha te vidyuta viprayogaha
"May you not suffer, like me, separation even for a moment from lightning (your wife)".
This pronouncement of the blessing forms what is called the Bharatavakya, the traditional closing line of a classical sanskrit literature work and marks the end of Meghaduta.
Kalidasa's Meghaduta (literally the cloud messenger) is probably the best known of his poetry that has come down to us. Its manageable length also makes it a popular target for translators, and numerous English versions exist. Ryder only provides a short, two page introduction to the poem -- adequate, but very basic. He does, however, also include annotations in the text itself -- brief explanatory notes based on Mallinatha's commentary -- and while they also only provide very small amounts of information they are fairly useful. They are also, as Ryder suggests, less obtrusive than foot- or endnotes. An example of their usefulness can be found in stanzas II.xxii through II.xxx (cf. FEE 81-89, LN 82-90), where Ryder notes that: "The passion of love passes through ten stages, eight of which are suggested in (...) the stanzas which follow", and each of which is then briefly noted. It is not vital information, but it is helpful -- certainly more so than, for example, LN, who notes in his Detailed Analysis about some of these stanzas that they "show the effects of separation (...) somewhat in the way Keats establishes pathos in 'To Autumn,' that is, by stylized portraits of a woman in one or another solitary and melancholy pose." Ryder divides the poem up into two halves -- "Former Cloud" (63 stanzas) and "Latter Cloud" (52 stanzas, for a total of 115 stanzas). (Cf. FEE and LN, who do not break up the text -- and whose versions have 110 and 111 stanzas respectively.) The division is a natural though not a necessary one. The Meghaduta was originally written in four-line stanzas, each line having seventeen syllables, in a metre called mandakranta (which Ryder describes as "a majestic metre called the 'slow stepper' "). Ryder chose to translate the stanzas in a five-lined rendition, with an ABABB rhyme-scheme (the Sanskrit does not rhyme). He believes this "gives perhaps as fair a representation of the original movement as may be, where direct imitation is out of the question." Cf. FEE and LN who both dispense with rhyme and have stanzas with four and six lines respectively. His rhyme scheme imposes considerable constraints on Ryder: there is a poetic feel to his version, but it comes at great cost to literal fidelity. Given how different a language Sanskrit is (and especially given the impossibility of finding equivalents for what LN calls the "coalescing of words" that is so common in Sanskrit), he may have been right to abandon literalness and focus on lyricism. Or not. Ryder's version reads quite well, but takes considerably greater liberties than the other versions. It is also the most Western version of the Meghaduta, and likely also the most distant from Kalidasa's -- except for that poetic "bounce" (or "movement", as Ryder prefers), which probably does give a somewhat better sense of the feel of the poem when read in Sanskrit.

The Cloud-Messenger tells the story of a Yaksha (a "divine attendant on Kubera, god of wealth") who is exiled for a year from his home and his young bride. After several months have already passed, and with the coming of the rainy season, the Yaksha asks a passing cloud to convey a message to his distant beloved. The poem covers the route the cloud would take, what it might see and encounter, and then focusses on the message and the bride itself. It is a beautiful and clever idea -- hard to ruin completely, regardless of the translation. The vivid journey -- focussed on the cloud's point of view -- has many remarkable points. It is a tour of much of India, as it were (and it is unfortunate that Ryder, FEE, and LN all fail to provide an illustrative map suggesting the route). Occasionally Ryder's simple expression is felicitous. Kalidasa's poems is full of striking images, from the teary lover trying to play a song on the lute that she herself composed but now can't recall to the urban and natural vistas the cloud would encounter. Love and longing, love and passion, dominate throughout, seen (or at least felt) in every scene, always in the air. Much of it Ryder conveys quite adequately, faltering only with the actual message that the cloud-messenger is to pass on. Where FEE, for example, there bluntly allows: "With his body thy body he enters" (98) and LN similarly suggests "by mere wish joins his body / with your body" (99), Ryder has no such joining or entering, only daring to "weave the fancies that thy soul entwine" (II.xxxix.4).

A decent -- and, to Western ears, the most poetic -- rendition, Ryder's The Cloud-Messenger serves as an acceptable Westernized (and sanitized) version of the Meghaduta. It is barely Kalidasa's poem, but given the near-impossibility of adequately conveying Kalidasa's Sanskrit in English it offers a tolerable compromise. Additional explanatory note might also have been useful, but the presentation is also adequate. • A lyric poem, the “Meghaduta,” contains, interspersed in a message from a lover to his absent beloved, an extraordinary series of unexcelled and knowledgeable vignettes, describing the mountains, rivers, and forests of northern India.
Prepared for by the systematization of the Sanskrit language by Pāṇini, the development of the great epics, notably the Rāmāyaṇa, and the refinements of prosody represented by the Pāli lyrics, there arose, in the first centuries ad, a Sanskrit literary style that governed canons of taste for a millennium and remained influential far later through modern Indian languages and their literatures. The style, called kāvya, is characterized by an extremely self-conscious effort on the part of the writer to compose poetry pleasing to both the ear and the mind.
Sanskrit poet and dramatist, probably the greatest Indian writer of any epoch. The six works identified as genuine are the dramas Abhijnanashakuntala (“The Recognition of Shakuntala”), Vikramorvashi (“Urvashi Won by Valour”), and Malavikagnimitra (“Malavika and Agnimitra”); the epic poems Raghuvamsha (“Dynasty of Raghu”) and Kumarasambhava (“Birth of the War God”); and the lyric “Meghaduta” (“Cloud Messenger”).
Unique in Sanskrit love poetry is Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta, in which the poet tries to go beyond the strophic unity of the short lyric (see below The short lyric), which normally characterizes love poems, by stringing the stanzas into a narrative.
Imminent translations : Leonard Nathan, Arthur Ryder, first translated into eng by Horace Hayman Wilson in 1813.

Écriture féminine, literally "women's writing,"[1] more closely, the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text, [2] is a strain of feminist literary theory that originated in France in the early 1970s and included foundational theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray[3], Chantal Chawaf[4],[5] and Julia Kristeva[6],[7] and also other writers like psychoanalytical theorist Bracha Ettinger [8] [9], who joined this field in the early 1990s. [10] Generally, French feminists tended to focus their attention on language, analyzing the ways in which meaning is produced. They concluded that language as we commonly think of it is a decidedly male realm, which therefore only represents a world from the male point of view. [11]
Nonetheless, the French women's movement developed in much the same way as the feminist movements elsewhere in Europe or in the United States: French women participated in consciousness-raising groups; demonstrated in the streets on 8 March; fought hard for women's right to choose whether to have children; raised the issue of violence against women; and struggled to change public opinion on issues concerning women and women's rights. The fact that the very first meeting of a handful of would-be feminist activists in 1970 only managed to launch an acrimonious theoretical debate, would seem to mark the situation as typically 'French' in its apparent insistence on the primacy of theory over politics. [12]
Hélène Cixous first coined écriture féminine in her essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975), where she asserts "Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies" because their sexual pleasure has been repressed and denied expression. Inspired by Cixous' essay, a recent book titled Laughing with Medusa (2006) analyzes the collective work of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bracha Ettinger and Hélène Cixous. [13] These writers are as a whole referred to by Anglophones as "the French feminists," though Mary Klages, Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has pointed out that "poststructuralist theoretical feminists" would be a more accurate term.[14] Madeleine Gagnon is a more recent proponent. And since the aforementioned 1975 when Cixous also founded women's studies at Vincennes, she has been as a spokeswoman for the group Psychanalyse et politique and a prolific writer of texts for their publishing house, des femmes. And when asked of her own writing she says, "Je suis la oCu ga parle" ("I am there where it/id/the female unconscious speaks.") [15]
American feminist critic and writer Elaine Showalter defines this movement as "the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text."[16] Écriture féminine places experience before language, and privileges non-linear, cyclical writing that evades "the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system."[17] Because language is not a neutral medium, the argument can be made that it functions as an instrument of patriarchal expression. Peter Barry writes that “the female writer is seen as suffering the handicap of having to use a medium (prose writing) which is essentially a male instrument fashioned for male purposes”[18]. Ecriture féminine thus exists as an antithesis of masculine writing, or as a means of escape for women. In the words of Rosemarie Tong, “Cixous challenged women to write themselves out of the world men constructed for women. She urged women to put themselves-the unthinkable/unthought-into words.”[19]
Almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity: about their sexuality, that is, its infinite and mobile complexity; about their eroticization, sudden turn-ons of a certain minuscule-immense area of their bodies; not about destiny, but about the adventure of such and such a drive, about trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings, discoveries of a zone at once timorous and soon to be forthright.[14]
With regard to phallocentric writing, Tong explains that "male sexuality, which centers on what Cixous called the "big dick", is ultimately boring in its pointedness and singularity. Like male sexuality, masculine writing, which Cixous usually termed phallogocentric writing, is also ultimately boring" and furthermore, that "stamped with the official seal of social approval, masculine writing is too weighted down to move or change"[19].
Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which the publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women- female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.[20]
For Cixous, écriture féminine is not only a possibility for female writers; rather, she believes it can be (and has been) employed by male authors such as James Joyce. Some have found this idea difficult to reconcile with Cixous’ definition of écriture féminine (often termed ‘white ink’) because of the many references she makes to the female body (“There is always in her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink”[21]) when characterizing the essence of écriture féminine and explaining its origin. This notion raises problems for some theorists:
"Ecriture féminine, then, is by its nature transgressive, rule-transcending, intoxicated, but it is clear that the notion as put forward by Cixous raises many problems. The realm of the body, for instance, is seen as somehow immune to social and gender condition and able to issue forth a pure essence of the feminine. Such essentialism is difficult to square with feminism which emphasizes femininity as a social construction…"[22]
For Luce Irigaray, women's sexual pleasure jouissance cannot be expressed by the dominant, ordered, "logical," masculine language because according to Kristeva, feminine language is derived from the pre-oedipal period of fusion between mother and child. Associated with the maternal, feminine language is not only a threat to culture, which is patriarchal, but also a medium through which women may be creative in new ways. Irigaray expressed this connection between women's sexuality and women's language through the following analogy: women's jouissance is more multiple than men's unitary, phallic pleasure because [23]
"woman has sex organs just about everywhere...feminine language is more diffusive than its 'masculine counterpart'. That is undoubtedly the reason...her language...goes off in all directions and...he is unable to discern the coherence." [24]
Irigaray and Cixous also go on to emphasize that women, historically limited to being sexual objects for men (virgins or prostitutes, wives or mothers), have been prevented from expressing their sexuality in itself or for themselves. If they can do this, and if they can speak about it in the new languages it calls for, they will establish a point of view (a site of difference) from which phallogocentric concepts and controls can be seen through and taken apart, not only in theory, but also in practice. [25]
Écriture féminine, especially well developed by these French and other European feminists, is now widely recognized by Anglophone scholars as a sub-category of feminist literary theory.
Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own, which describes three stages in the history of women's literature, also proposes a similar multi-part model of the growth of feminist theory. First, according to Showalter, comes an androgynist poetics. Next, a feminist critique and female Aesthetic, accompanied by gynocritics, follows, and these are closely pursued by gynesic poststructuralist feminist criticism and gender theory.
Androgynist poetics, having relations and perhaps roots in mid-Victorian women's writing of imitation, contends that the creative mind is sexless, and the very foundation of describing a female tradition in writing was sexist. Critics of this vein found gender as imprisoning, nor believed that gender had a bearing in the content of writing, which, according to Joyce Carol Oates is actually culture-determined. Imagination is too broad to be hemmed in by gender.
However, from the 1970s on, most feminist critics reject the genderless mind, finding that the "imagination" cannot evade the conscious or unconscious structures of gender. Gender, it could be said, is part of that culture-determination which Oates says serves as inspiration. Such a position emphasizes "the impossibility of separating the imagination from a socially, sexually, and historically positioned self." This movement of thought allowed for a feminist critique as critics attacked the meaning of sexual difference in a patriarchal society/ideology. Images of male-wrought representations of women (stereotypes and exclusions) came under fire, as was the "'division, oppression, inequality, [and] interiorized inferiority for women.'"
The female experience, then, began to take on positive affirmations. The Female Aesthetic arose -- expressing a unique female consciousness and a feminine tradition in literature -- as it celebrated an intuitive female approach in the interpretation of women's texts. It "spoke of a vanished nation, a lost motherland; of female vernacular or Mother Tongue; and of a powerful but neglected women's culture." Writers like Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, emerging out of the Victorian period and influenced by its writings were perhaps the first women to recognize this. In "Professions for Women," Woolf discusses how a woman writer seeks within herself "the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber," inevitably colliding against her own sexuality to confront "something about the body, about the passions."
The French feminists of the day discussed this Mother Tongue, calling it l'écriture feminine. Accessible to men and women alike, but representing "female sexual morphology," l'écriture feminine sought a way of writing which literally embodied the female, thereby fighting the "subordinating, linear style of classification or distinction." Showalter finds that whether this clitoral, vulval, vaginal, or uterine; whether centered on semiotic pulsions, childbearing, or jouissance, the feminist theorization of female sexuality/textuality, and its funky audacity in violating patriarchal taboos by unveiling the Medusa, is an exhilarating challenge to phallic discourse.
There are problems with the Female Aesthetic, which feminist critics recognized. Even its most fervent fans avoided defining exactly what constituted the style of l'écriture feminine, as any definition would then categorize it and safely subsume it as a genre under the linear patriarchal structure. Its very restlessness and ambiguity defied identification as part of its identity. Needless to say, some feminists and women writers could feel excluded by the surreality of the Female Aesthetic and its stress on the biological forms of female experience, which, as Showalter says, also bears close resemblance to sexist essentialism. Men may try their hand at writing woman's bodies, but according to the feminist critique and Aesthetic, only woman whose very biology gave her an edge, could read these texts successfully -- risking marginalization and ghettoization of both women's literature and theory. Lastly, the Female Aesthetic was charged with racism, as it rarely referred to racial or class differences between women and largely referred to a white woman's literary tradition.
Gynocritics, which developed shoulder-to-shoulder with the Female Aesthetic, attempted to resolve some of these problems, by agreeing that women's literature lay as the central concern for feminist criticism, but "rejected the concept of an essential female identity and style." One branch of gynocriticism sought to revise Freudian structures and take the edge off of an adversarial methodology of criticism. These critics emphasized a Pre-Oedipal phase wherein the daughter's bond to her mother inscribes the key factor in gender identity. Matriarchal values desolve intergenerational conflicts and build upon a female tradition of literature rather than the struggle of Oedipus and Lais at the crossroads.
Poststructuralism eventually influenced the course of feminist theory with the idea of a motherless as well as fatherless text. The female experience, as it relates to texts, only occurs in the feminine subjectivity of the reading process. "Gynesis" or "gynetic disruptions" occur in texts when the reader explores "the textual consequences and representations of 'the feminine.'" These considerations or interruptions in the discourse indicate a consideration or interruption of the patriarchal system.
Lastly and most recently are developments of an over-arching gender theory, which considers gender, both male and female, as a social construction upon biological differences. Gender theory proposes to explore "ideological inscription and the literary effects of the sex/gender system," and as many advantages, opening up the literary theory stage and bringing in questions of masculinity into feminist theory. Also, taking gender as a fundamental analytic category brings feminist criticism from the margin to the center, though risks depoliticizing the study of women.

On the one hand, the role of women in national liberation movements has legitimised their coming out of the home into the public sphere, and has helped them confront their own subordination within a domestic patriarchy along with the national oppressor. It has left a heritage of struggle and pride, as indicated in the title ``We Also Made History'' given to an account of women's role in the Telengana movement.
On the other hand, the elite's concern to defend their ``national culture'' against western invasion has led them to defend the subordination of women to the community, and with it some of the most retrograde of traditional customs. The well-known paradigm is the veil: women in many Muslim countries threw aside the veil as they emerged to take part in the struggle, or at times used it as a form of disguise, a means of hiding from imperialist forces. But after the struggle, in too many cases the veil was re- imposed. Not only the veil; African nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta were ready to defend even the cruel custom of female circumcision as a symbol of tradition and self which had to be maintained.
The long-term meaning of nationalism for women, then, has varied with the collective strength they have gained in the course of struggle. Too often it seems that the male nationalist elite has been able to deprive them of this strength. The case of India is becoming increasingly well documented with recent scholarship. Among some of the most important works are historian Uma Chakravarty's study of Pandita Ramabai and her times, titled ``Rewriting History'', and an impressive collection of articles edited by Chakravarty and Kumkum Sangari, ``From Myths to Markets''. Pandita Ramabai was the daughter of an outcast Brahman - outcast partly for educating his daughters - and famously defended by Mahatma Phule for her contributions to women's education. Phule had argued that education was the key to women's liberation as to that of the ``Shudras and Ati-Shudras'', saying that once the daughters and daughters-in-law of Brahmans learnt to read the sacred scriptures they would scornfully hurl them all away.
But this did not happen; although Ramabai herself was an early feminist, founder of perhaps the first autonomous women's organisation, she was neatly sidelined by the elite after she converted to Christianity, having discovered that in her words, ``there were two things on which all these books the Dharmashastras, the sacred epics, the Puranas and modern poets, the popular preachers of the present day and orthodox high caste men were agreed, that women... as a class were all bad, very bad, worse than demons, as unholy as untruth, and that they could not get moksa like men''.
This was too much for even the moderate Brahmans, who continued to idealise many aspects of ancient Vedic society.
But in telling this story, it needs to be asked, whose history is Chakravarty rewriting? Apparently that of the nationalists themselves, including such contemporary intellectuals as Partha Chatterjee of the well- known Subaltern studies school. In an early article Chatterjee had argued that the ``nationalist resolution of the women's question'' was achieved when the nationalists used the division between ``inner'' and ``outer'', the ``home'' and the ``outside'' world to maintain the inner, spiritual world as the realm of their inviolate cultural essence, barred to western aggression in contrast to the humiliation they had to face in the public world of the colonisers. Women became both the symbol of the inner world and its guardians; they were not to be subordinated in the traditional religious way but they were to be discouraged from taking part in the public sphere except as an extension of the home, and they were to be educated to be conveyers of the national culture. It may be said that just as the RSS is out to control education today, nationalist men were anxious to control it from the nineteenth century onwards.
For Indian women, however, the inner world has had characteristics of a prison; the family has been the collective agent of her subordination. Escaping from the ``four walls'' of the home has always been a major theme of women's struggles for liberation, whether they were organising as part of the broader workers' or farmers' movement or on their own issues. It is no wonder then that feminists have begun to critique Chatterjee for being too satisfied with his ``nationalist resolution'', indeed, the communitarians who have posed the national community as an alternative to the heartless individualism of the world of western commercialism have generally been silent about what these communities have meant for women. Thus in a recent article in The Economic and Political Weekly, Himani Banerjee notes that Chatterjee's writings on the women's question signalled a departure from the earlier agenda of Subaltern studies of critiquing nationalism and recovering the history of the oppressed.
Feminists have also extended the interpretation of this ``nationalist resolution''. One of the strongest chapters in Chakravarty's book is a depiction not of the orthodox elite but of the liberal reformer M. G. Ranade. Ranade, as is well known, caved in to family pressures and rather than marry a child widow, agreed to marry the girl chosen by his father. He then had her educated - but to be a suitable companion and fit wife and mother for a new generation of ``modern'' Indians. It was not so different from Gandhi dragging Kasturba along with his dietary quirks and his brahmachari vows.
This ``guided'' education of women, organised both privately and in public schemes for women's education, was designed to undercut the radical potential of education that had been embodied in the spectre of Pandita Ramabai. It produced women such as Anandibai Joshi and Kashibai Kanitkar, who - as is shown by Meera Kosambi's study in the Myths to Markets volume - in spite of being a woman doctor and woman novelist respectively, continued to subordinate themselves to their family. In becoming educated, they had to confront all the tensions generated among more orthodox women left behind. ``Women became the site where the conflict between the old and the new was played out'' as Kosambi puts it. In Bengal also, the first woman's autobiography by Rashsundari Debi reveals the incredible amount of household labour even elite women put in to maintaining the traditional ``inner world'' to the liking of nationalists.
Thus the nationalist project of maintaining the spiritual core of their culture, identified with the family, often simply gave a new justification for ongoing patriarchal control of women's sexuality and labour.
BY MANY measures, India is one of the most patriarchal countries in the world. It has lower female literacy rates than many African countries; only recently have women's lifespans begun to equal men's - in sharp contrast to most countries where women tend to outlive men - and maternal mortality rates remain high. The most stark measure of all is perhaps Prof. Amartya Sen's concept of ``missing women'' - the low sex ratio in India means that some 37 million to 38 million women who might otherwise be alive today have died due to neglect and maltreatment.
This seems clearly related to aspects of Indian culture, rather than simply worldwide economic and political processes. Feminists have been reluctant to examine the specific casual factors behind this, in particular the role of Brahmanism and caste society, though condemning Manu is a common theme of the women's movement. However, one of those who had asked analytical questions recently, Nirmala Banerjee, comes up with some provocative answers. Banerjee's essay, ``Analyzing Women's Work Under Patriarchy'', is published in the volume ``From Myths to Markets'' edited by Kumkum Sangari and Uma Chakravarty, and begins with a critique of the ``common sense'' understanding that greater workforce participation will give more independence to women. Banerjee argues against both neo-classical and marxist versions of this, claiming that the evidence in India is against it, showing that jobs are often defined as ``women's work'' and assigned low pay and status only after they get filled by women. Indeed, many of the other studies in the volume document the continuing joint family control over women's work; just as with education, the potentially liberating influence of ``economic'' independence has been neutralised by patriarchal controls in India.
The solution that Banerjee favours derives from a thesis by Heidi Hartmann in regard to European developments. Hartmann argues that male control over women's participation in the workforce - and the resulting low pay and worsened conditions for women - did not come simply from the prior subordinate position of women in the family, with time occupied in domestic work and childcare. Rather, the specific collective powers gained by male workers through the trade union movement functioned against women in Europe, allowing them to use union regulations and powers to subordinate women both in the workplace and the home. In Europe what gained strength with the rise of capitalist industrialisation was the notion of a ``family wage'' which assumed the existence of a working male and a house-bound wife. Strikingly, the institution that proved helpful for the betterment of male workers' condition, unions, worked against women.
Hartmann's thesis, as Banerjee notes, does not apply per se to India, where the union movement was never so strong. But it does point to collective agency, and it suggests - though Banerjee does not herself draw this conclusion - that the equivalent in India to the labour movement in Europe, the nationalist movement, played the same role. The ideological role played by the ``family wage'' in maintaining home and children in Europe was matched by the cultural-nationalist role of the ``Hindu woman'', modelled after Sita and Savitri, which was popularised and spread in India during the colonial period. It was a time when, as Uma Chakravarti shows in ``Rewriting History'', the differentiated caste- hierarchical model of women's subordination was replaced by a single model. Given the popularity of literature about women, probably as much energy went into building the new structures of women's subordination as into any aspect of national culture.
Recently, some historians have argued that far from caste being a ``timeless'' feature of Indian society it was, if not actually constructed during the colonial period, strengthened and helped to consolidate its hold throughout India. The ``brahmanic'' model, which had been most hegemonic in the irrigated areas and river valleys, now was taken as the norm throughout. British courts helped in that they enforced ``brahmanic'' as Hindu law, but elite action was just as crucial. In the same way it can be argued that the new communication and transportation networks in colonial India - and arguments for ``national unity'' against the alien rulers - helped the patriarchal elite in consolidating a ``modern'' form of the subordination of ``Hindu'' women. Women who would otherwise have protested more strongly against oppressive customs were also drawn into assent to them as an aspect of maintaining their national identity; this can be seen in the autobiographical writings of Anandibai Joshi and even Pandita Ramabai, who was provoked by the chauvinism of church authorities to insist on many of the customs of the ``high-caste Hindu woman'' whose situation she was otherwise so critical about.
There was protest against this version of ``national unity'', of course, and arguments that an equalitarian nation had first to be created - coming from Bahujan and Dalit spokesmen such as Phule, Periyar, Ambedkar and others. They also maintained a much more critical view of women's position. Phule's personal life, for example, stood in strong contrast with Ranade's assent to the pressure of his joint family; when he and his wife were childless, they decided to adopt - and going against all ``Hindu'' custom they adopted the son of a brahman widow. It resulted in at least temporary expulsion from the household, not to mention causing somewhat of a storm in the elite circles of Pune, for whom the treatment of brahman widows had become a sore point.
For Phule, the family was very far from being the centre in which the inner spiritual identity of the nationalist Hindu could be maintained; he even postulated that in his ideal family, the father could be a Satyasamajist, the mother a Buddhist, the son a Muslim, the daughter a Christian! This represented a radical separation of the family and cultural identity. Similarly, as V. Geetha has shown, Periyar not only linked the subordination of women to brahmanic caste hierarchy, but also questioned traditional ``Tamil cultural'' notions of chastity.
But these were dissenting voices. It was the ``nationalist resolution of the women's question'' which triumphed, and which has probably helped in maintaining the continued strength of the patriarchal family and the culture that surrounds it in India today. Now that the BJP is in power, and the RSS is pushing its ``Hindu nationalist'' cultural agenda in all the educational and cultural institutions of society, the situation is likely to become worse - or at least provoke sharpening conflict.
However, the question remains, if the women's movement was too weak in the colonial period to confront elite nationalism with its own equalitarian and nationalist agenda, where is the hope that it will gather renewed strength today?
The "Public" and "Private" Realms of Political Personhood
Colonial powers brought with them daunting philosophical, theological, naval and mercantile traditions they used to justify occupation and control. Separating public from private, particular from universal, human from divine, family from state, and male from female realms of experience and action forms a crucial aspect of these traditions.
The Western Philosophical Tradition
In western philosophical and political traditions the public realm of the polis, state, city, or republic becomes the site where people consent to or contest the laws, contracts, covenants, or principles of community that govern personal and social conduct. For Aristotle, man is "by nature an animal intended to live in a polis" (Baker, 1962, p. 4). The private realm, defined by the hearth and home remains the loci of family, comfort, and individual identity. The family as the primary and immediate unit of society forms the training ground for conduct, nature, and morality. The public realm of the polis and the spiritual realm of the family come with particular inhabitants. While the public realm has been the domain of the western male subject, the private realm belongs to the wife, daughter, mother, sister who are responsible for the passing down of traditions (such as honoring the dead), maintaining the sacred flame of the domestic altar, and the healthy upbringing of children. Men also functioned as fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers within the family but did not take these roles with them into public life where history, community, and state demanded mutual recognition and progress toward rational and universal goals.
Crucial to the relegation of different realms to men and women were notions of the inherent characteristics of men and women. Men embody rationality, thought, non-feeling, justice, critical judgment, objectivity, sternness, individuality, and propensity for violence and acquisition. Women embody feeling, fickleness, cunning, purity, subjectivity, spirituality, possessiveness, delicacy, virtue, dependence, sensuousness, and unbrazened sexuality.1 The contradictory nature of these qualities reinforced the unity and rationality of the male while at the same time proving the fickleness and fragmentation of the female and hence her 'natural' unfitness for public life. For Aristotle, the citizens are the "integral parts" of the polis while women, children, slaves, mechanics and laborers are the "necessary conditions." (Baker, p. 108).
With the disjunction of public and private, male and female, the family becomes inherently naturalized, depoliticised, and dehistoricised. The heterosexual legal and moral union establishes itself as prior to history (history only happens when men leave the home) as well as outside of history. Heterosexuality, the social, economic, and political reasons for the legal institution of marriage, and the moral status assigned to this union are not the subject of historical scrutiny and are not open to the possibility of change or dismantling. In addition to history, the separation between public and private has an impact on morality. For Aristotle, the polis is the highest good, "the final and perfect association." Citizenship alone does not grant moral goodness but is attained through reason and participation.2 The particular position of women and children in the household enabled them to share in the goodness but not to attain or acquire it. For Hegel, the natural differentiation of the sexes translates into an ethical differentiation.3 In the mere "natural existence" of the family, women remain the "object" of male desire which "overreaches" their ability for rational, self-conscious individuality through active participation in the ethical order, manifested in the "actuality" of the state. They are thus for Aristotle the "naturally ruled" (Baker, p. 34). The separation of the public as political realm and private as apolitical with the greater public association being in the polis and the lesser private association being in the family resonates in the works of western scholars such as Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Locke, Hume, Nietzsche, and Hegel. While Machiavelli explicitly separates morality from public life and focuses on power, Hegel grants divine law to women and the family while human law belongs to the rational state.4
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The Indian Nationalist Response to the Public Question
In colonial and postcolonial contexts, the public and private realms took on a different shape. The expansion of European modern states into Empires of the Orient transformed the scope of the public sphere. The western male subject, fashioned on principles of "moral goodness," (Aristotle) and "rational self-conscious individuality" (Hegel) faced a contradiction: How to justify slavery, oppression and exploitation of native men in the colonies who as men were rational, individual, and superior to women and hence were equally deserving of freedom and dignity? At this juncture the categories of male and female become racially marked and the public and private realms are reconfigured in terms of the colonial and nationalist projects.
This reconfiguration involved the simultaneous effeminisation and hypersexualisation of Hindu Bengali men by British colonizers in an effort to naturalize British patriarchy. By drawing a parallel between the characteristics of British women and Bengali men both were deemed incapable of public, political participation (Chatterjee, 1993, p. 35-157; Sinha, 1995, p. 33-68).5 The status of Indian women in Indian tradition served as the key issue in this process of effeminisation. In response, Indian nationalists, many of whom had received western education, accepted the superiority of the west in the public sphere of rationality, progress, impersonal bureaucracy, and modernization but maintained their cultural superiority in the private, spiritual sphere, traditionally the domain of Indian women.6
Gender and Nation
For Partha Chatterjee, the Indian nationalist project involved "an ideological justification for the selective appropriation of western modernity," a process that continues even today. By focusing on practices such as sati, arranged marriages and purdah, colonization involved "assuming sympathy with the unfree and oppressed womanhood of India, [through which] the colonial mind was able to transform this figure of the Indian woman into a sign of the inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the entire cultural tradition of a country" (p. 118). The nationalists sought a specific site of resistance for Indian cultural identity while at the same time fighting for an independent nation-state. The constituted dichotomy of the world/home or the spiritual/material lay at the heart of this nationalist project.7
According to Chatterjee the modern Hindu Bengali woman received education in classic Hindu literature and the inculcation of the virtues of "orderliness, thrift, cleanliness, and a personal sense of responsibility, the practical skills of literacy, accounting, hygiene, and the ability to run the household according to new physical and economic conditions set by the outside world. For this she would also need to have some idea of the world outside the home, into which she could even venture as long as it did not threaten her femininity. It is this latter criterion, now invested with a characteristically nationalist content, that made possible the displacement of boundaries of the home from the physical confines earlier defined by purdah to a more flexible, but nonetheless culturally determinate, domain set by differences between socially approved male and female conduct. Once the essential femininity of women was fixed in terms of certain culturally visible spiritual qualities, they could go to schools, travel in public conveyances, watch public entertainment programs, and in time even take up public employment outside the home" (p. 130, emphasis original).
The "domain set by differences," clearly marked for the Hindu middle-class Bengali woman her "superiority over the Western woman for whom, it was believed education meant only the acquisition of material skills to compete with men in the outside world and hence a loss of feminine (spiritual) virtues; superiority over the preceding generation of women in their own homes who had been denied the opportunity of freedom by an oppressive and degenerate social tradition and superiority over the women of the lower classes who were culturally incapable of appreciating the virtues of freedom" (p. 129). In this project the category of woman itself could not be assumed to imply a universal signification as a specific type of woman came to represent the ideal. In relation to colonial India, the "agon of decolonization" found its vocabulary through very particular constructions of Victorian and Indian womanhood. These were not articulated within the realm of history proper or as constructions mediated by the very process of differentiation but retained the symbolic and metaphoric role of women as the "innate nature" of a nation. This inner domain of women became invested with the urgency of preserving the sanctity of national culture. Under the guise of greater freedom, the "nationalist resolution" served to elide the problematic status of women as both participants in public contestation of colonial rule as well as their traditional roles as wives and mothers, demarcated under the auspices of Hinduism as stridharma. The potential effects of an independent women's voice were contained as a very part of the nationalist vocabulary of resistance.