Medea

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 49

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Poisoned Gifts

When Medea hatches her plan to kill Creusa, she decides to send several gifts to the young princess: a beautiful cloak, a gold necklace, and a beautiful hairband made of gold and gems. These gifts will be laced with a terrible poison, causing Creusa’s death. The poisoned gifts symbolize the contrast between Creusa’s naivety and Medea’s cunning. Although Creusa never speaks or appears on stage, the gifts imply that she fulfils the stereotype of a spoiled and perhaps vapid young girl. Other characters only ever praise Creusa for her youth and beauty, and Medea’s choice of gifts suggests that Creusa is likely vain and susceptible to (literal) shiny objects. Given the foreboding circumstances around her wedding, it seems that Creusa should exercise caution about any gifts, but she fatally accepts them with open arms. Medea’s choice to have the gifts delivered by her children also enhances the symbolism that Creusa is essentially a child herself.

The symbolism of the gifts also establishes the contrast between Creusa and Medea as romantic rivals: Creusa is foolish enough to fall for the trick, while Medea is clever and powerful enough to enact it. When Medea herself was a young princess, she had the intelligence and courage to spring into action and come to the aid of Jason. Despite the unfavorable contrast between the two characters, Creusa is beloved and mourned, while Medea is vilified and abandoned.

Anger as a Force of Nature

Throughout the play, there is a consistent motif of comparing anger (specifically Medea’s) to natural forces, such as storms, fire, and ocean waves. For example, the Chorus remarks, “Force of flame, wind’s turbulent buffet, javelins/None of these come down with a force so mighty/None as fearful as when an ex-wife, rejected/Hates with hot passion” (III.579-581). The motif enhances their perception of Medea’s wild, untamed, and barbaric character: unlike the supposedly civilized Greeks, she represents an unknown and uncontrolled land, and is more closely aligned with nature than with civilization.

As a foreigner from a supposedly uncivilized place, Medea’s anger is particularly apt for comparisons to natural forces, but this comparison also relates to women more generally. Especially in Classical times, stereotypes tended to align men with principles of reason and order, while women were often portrayed as subject to the whims of their passions and emotions. Finally, the motif of natural forces also reveals the uneasy fears around something powerful, which emphasizes that characters are afraid of Medea because they know how powerful she is. Much like an ocean storm or a blazing fire, Medea’s wrath has the capacity to cause great harm, and it cannot be controlled or contained.

Death by Burning

Medea’s poison is concocted to trigger a horrendously painful death: after she comes into contact with the poison, Creusa will be burnt up from the inside so that the “newly wedded bride [will] outdo her marriage torch/With her own smoking hair” (IV.838-839). Creusa’s fiery death ends up also consuming Creon and triggering an inferno that consumes the palace and begins to spread throughout Corinth. The burning that Medea’s poison triggers is symbolic of passion, rage, and how revenge feeds upon itself. Medea’s plan is not a cold and calculated one; she is acting recklessly, out of strong emotion, and with complete disregard for the consequences. The fire and burning symbolize the force of her emotions and her difficulty containing and controlling them. Medea is also carrying out revenge because of the love she once had for Jason, and fire has a long history as a symbol of passion and desire.

Finally, the fire symbolizes the ultimately unsatisfying nature of Medea’s quest for revenge. Just as fires tend to grow and spread, growing larger and hotter, Medea’s first act of revenge merely ignites her desire for more. The fiery death that Medea enacts is more indirect: because it does not satisfy her and only stokes the fire of her hatred and longing for vengeance, she must progress from there to her final crime of murdering her own children.