Medea Trickster Essay

Words: 680
Pages: 3

"As Lewis Hyde suggests, tricksters are ‘boundary-crossers’ who do not accept physical, social, or temporal constraints as real, and who seem deliberately to blur culturally fixed lines of distinction (male and female, sacred and profane, young and old, living and dead, and right and wrong). Out of the many characters from the stories that have been read, Medea fits this definition almost perfectly. At first as mentioned in Hyde’s description her deception is sly. But has the story progresses her acts of hatred toward Jason become more and more obvious. In the Greek Play The Medea, the protagonist of the story Medea portrayed as the trickster in this story. Medea is a lady stuck in a male ruled place and is compelled to live her life through the decisions of all the males that are around her, especially her husband Jason. She looks for …show more content…
She is dishonest, disobeys the king’s order and lies to her husband for the sake of revenge. She is also a trickster because she goes as far as to kill the king, his daughter, as well as her own children just to get back at her husband. “Medea's horrifying murder of her children demonstrates the danger of responding to any form of victimization with an indulgence in unnatural violence. She cultivates a rage surpassing the measure appropriate to her offense and allows it to become an instrument for gratuitous cruelty” (Medea). One example of this is when Medea uses flattery to convince Jason to allow her children to bring the poisoned robe and tiara to his new bride. To do so Medea says to Jason, "Even the gods they claim / are won by gift. And among mortal men / gold works more wonders than a thousand words / Her fortune's on the rise. gods favour her / She's young with royal power to command" (970). Medea’s combination of being dishonest and being a trickster help her in almost any plan she wanted to