Medea Persuasive Essay

Although Euripides play Medea creates feelings of fear in the audience, it also creates feeling of pity in the audience as well. Medea is firstly portrayed as a pitiful woman whose problem is much bigger than her own life. Facing the fact that she will be exiled very soon and the fact that she has nowhere to go, combined with her abhorrence towards her enemies, she starts to devise a plan that not only will set her free from her problems but also will cost a fortune to her enemies. But the audience is later shocked by the way she does her revenge. Her revenge is horrendous and brutal. It now shows a totally different character of Medea – she is no longer a woman to be pitied, but she is now a monster to be feared – because she breaches normative values that the society holds dear by murdering her enemies in an inhumane way to even murdering her own children as a way to hurt her enemy even though she herself is also hurt.

It is for Medea and Medea alone the audience first feel pity. The play
The depiction of Medea with dragon-drawn chariot is indeed a tricky affair. It argues that the god of justice is approving horrifying deeds Medea has done. Such a conclusion seems uneasy to understand to the audience. It can only be resolved if we accept the god’s intervention as a direct rebuke to all that Jason and the audience holds dear. From the beginning, the audience has been drawn to fear Medea with all her immoral acts. The play now draws the audience to fear Jason’s unfaithfulness and pity him for the consequences he gets as a result – he will live out a lonely, worthless existence and face a shameful