Euripides! Master! How Well Yo
In this paper I will demonstrate why I believe, contrary to widespread opinion and possible even his own, that Aristophanes, not Euripides, was, of the four major dramatists fo Athens' Golden Age, the one who least respected women.
Having become aware at the ouset of this leterrature course of the position of women in the otherwise enlightened thought of Greece in the Fifth Century B.C., I kept my eyes open during our reading for evidences of, if I may comit an anchronism, chauvinism in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Consoled by the knoledge presented in the text that Aristophanes had accused Euripides of hating women. I didn't look for it in Lysistrata. Nevertheless, ...
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as disparaging. She is said to "maneuver like a man," and Cassandra exclaims, "What outrage--the woman kills the man!" The chorus asks her "What drove her insane" enough to kill a man. Her lover, Aegisthus, although he gloats over the body he cringed from cutting down, allows that "the treachery was the woman's work, clearly." Far from denigrating women, however, I believe these parrotings of the prevailing attitudes, when juxtaposed with Aeschylus' portrayal of an intelligent, capable Clytaemnestra, a gullible, ususpecting Agamemnon and a spineless, parasitical Aegisthus, achieve the result of satirizing those attitudes. At the close of the play, Clytaemnestra challenges her listeners, on-stage and off: "That is what a woman has to say. Can you accept the truth?"
Sophocles takes it one step further. His heroine is not a murderess, but a young women driven by deeply held ideals and familial love. I don't know there could be any doubt in any viewer's mind as to who is the "good ...
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double standard of fidelity. She scoffs at the men's excuse that women live free from danger while they (the men) go out the battle with the pointed, "Fools, I'd rather stand three times in the front line than bear a child." The adulterous Jason sounds supercilious and hard-hearted adjuring her that she has "talked like a fool" instead of "quietly accepting the decisions of those in power" and banishing her--prancing to his own fate. Medea is, as the Nurse puts it, a "frightenning woman." She does murder her own children. However, she does so in a red haze of pain and anger. Her entire identity has been wrapped up in her man; she has no other life of her own. Abandoned and rejected by ...
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"Euripides! Master! How Well Yo." Essayworld.com. October 10, 2004. Accessed November 20, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Euripides-Master-How-Well-Yo/15657.
"Euripides! Master! How Well Yo." Essayworld.com. October 10, 2004. Accessed November 20, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Euripides-Master-How-Well-Yo/15657.
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