Women of Ancient Greece: The Plays of Euripides
The plays of Euripides reveal how poorly women were viewed in ancient Greece. From Medea to Sthenoboea to Phaedra, Euripides' women cover a wide range of forms: the vengeful, jilted lover; the plotting wife; the incestuous, lustful mother. As Chong-Gossard points out, Euripides does not shy away from "tapping into men's anxieties and frightening them with Medeas and Phaedras...women keeping silent about their devious plots."[footnoteRef:1] If anything, Euripides plays serve to reinforce the notion that in a patriarchal society, a man can never let down his guard against a woman -- because, judging from the works of Euripides, women are some of the most treacherous beings to ever walk the face of the earth. This paper will show how female power was depicted so monstrously in the works of Euripides and what it meant to Greek viewers. [1: James Harvey Kim On Chong-Gossard, Gender and Communication in Euripides' Plays (MA: Brill, 2008) 246.]
Strong female characters in Euripides' works typically figure in tragedies: their power and strength plays a part in a tragic sequence of events that brings catastrophic suffering to others. In Medea, for instance, the title character is a strong "foreign-born" woman who has married Jason and come to live in Greece. But when Jason leaves Medea for a "better" match, she vows to have her revenge. Her revenge is so cruel, however, that the...
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