Who is the real tragic hero in The Madea, Madea, the princess of Colchis or Jason, the king of Iolcus? The tragic story is about a woman Madea, whom gives up her home, family and everything else in her life for Jason. Against her father’s wishes she helps Jason defeat his quest to a Golden Fleece. Madea eventually marries Jason and raises two sons. Unfortunately, Jason abandons Madea and marries the beautiful daughter of Corinth. Madea went from a lover and partner in crime to an obsessive prideful monster. Madea becomes furious and comes up with a plan to make everyone around her suffer, including her children but especially Jason. By looking at the story The Madea, one can see the plot is a tragedy, which is important because of the murders Madea commits. Madea’s obsessive pride and inability of the separation of her and Jason drove her to destroy everyone she loves. Jason cannot be the tragic hero because he brought the situation upon himself. Madea gave up her family and life for him and Jason does not appreciate anything she did for him in order to escape and marry him.
Aristotle’s De Poetica defines tragedy as mimetic, serious and contains rhythm. A tragedy also contains six elements; plot, thought characters, song, diction, and spectacle. Tragedy arouses feelings of pity and fear and then turns these feelings with catharsis. According to the ideas laid out by Aristotle, for a tragedy to arouse pity and fear, a tragic hero’s life makes a wrong turn. As quoted by Aristotle he describes the perfect plot of a tragedy “A well-constructed plot should, therefore, be single in its issue, rather than double as some maintain. The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad.” (17). The plot in M...
... middle of paper ...
... pity because her husband Jason abandons her but the choices she made were extremely evil. The audience always knew Madea had some evil characteristics to her when she murdered her brother tossed the pieces of his corpse with no shame or dignity to buy some time in her escape with Jason.
In conclusion, The Madea and Oedipus the King both have the same criteria Aristotle states in The Poetics. Both tales had the audience with feelings of catharsis regardless of the complex plot. Madea and Oedipus went through extreme measures for people they loved only to find out nothing was not worth it. Their noble nature to help others and to be involved leads them to downfall and leaves them lonely and depressed.
Works Cited
Butcher, S.H. The Poetics of Aristotle trans. Pennsylvania State University: The Electronic Classic Series, Copyright 2000-2013. Web. 24 February 2014.
Medea, a barbarian woman who once complied with Jason to acquire the Golden Fleece betrays her country by killing her brother and father to run in exile to Corinth. Jason takes Medea, who is not from a Greek background to Greece, a male-dominated society, where he then betrays her for a royal bed. This causes Medea to seek revenge and kill individuals around Jason including her own children. Medea is considered a tragic drama where the protagonist, Medea, atrociously murders innocent individuals in order to get revenge on Jason who betrayed her by marrying a princess. Although Jason’s betrayal causes Medea sorrow, there is overwhelming evidence throughout the play of characters who heard Medea’s evil plans of revenge towards innocent victims, therefore, her immoral actions shall be given a trial in Corinth where
Even at the end, Jason still does not take blame but rather mock Medea and call her stupid, selfish, unreasonable, and emotional, as she just can't seem to view things his way. Marianne Hopman explains why Medea decided to kill as her plan of revenge. Hopman states that when Medea was talking to Jason before , she put his heroic deeds in jeopardy as it was Medea who did all the heroic stuff and Jason was just there. Hopman says that the reason why Medea killed off the princess was mostly because Medea wanted to save her from the same faith Medea had as she was also a lovestruck princess who fell in love and got married. Another factor that Hopman uses is that her children were the only thing standing in the way of Medea moving on, they were like rocks sinking in her in waters reminding Medea of the life she had with Jason. So it was expected of Medea to kill them as they were the last thing Medea had with Jason since the marriage was over with. The dead family symbolizes the broken and now dead marriage and household that Jason and Medea
All her efforts, only to be betrayed by the man she loved the most. Unfortunately, her misery did not end with the betrayal. She sought revenge on the traitor that carried no guilt and felt that Medea’s sex was to blame, for she was the one that had been weak and acted out of love for so many years. After much thought and self-conflict, she decided to murder the new bride of her former husband and taking the life of her own children. Euripides made Jason’s character to be self-centered and having “a minimum capacity to understand the feelings of others” (Jacobs). Leading Medea to commit a most horrible act, knowing that it would at last cause Jason the same pain that he had cause her: she murdered their
In Medea, a woman betrays her homeland because of her love for a man. Jason is the husband that she ferociously loves and makes sacrifices for. They have two children together: Antigone and Ismeme. In Jason's quest for the golden fleece, Medea assists him in multiple ways. One of the things she does to help their cause is bring about the death of her own brother. Certainly this is a woman who would sacrifice anything for her husband. Weigel records the fierceness of Medea's passion in his critique: "As a woman of passion, Medea is wholly committed to Jason as the object of her emotional life, whether in love or hate. When she loved Jason she did not hesitate to kill her brothe...
...ods come for the free drugs that he offers. Johnny is a man for whom we feel pride, shame and pity all at once but such a contradictory character would be unstable and unpredictable. Aristotle defines tragedy according to seven characteristics. These are that it is characterized by mimicry, it is serious, it expresses a full story of a relevant length, it contains rhythm and harmony, the rhythm and harmony occur in different combinations in different parts of the tragedy, it is performed not narrated and that it provokes feelings of pity and fear then purges these feelings through catharsis the purging of the emotions and emotional tensions. The composition of a tragedy consists of six segments. In order of relevance, these are plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and performance. For a comedy the ending must be merry. Instead Jerusalem ends in death.
In Medea, a play by Euripides, Jason possesses many traits that lead to his downfall. After Medea assists Jason in his quest to get the Golden Fleece, killing her brother and disgracing her father and her native land in the process, Jason finds a new bride despite swearing an oath of fidelity to Medea. Medea is devastated when she finds out that Jason left her for another woman after two children and now wants to banish her. Medea plots revenge on Jason after he gives her one day to leave. Medea later acts peculiarly as a subservient woman to Jason who is oblivious to the evil that will be unleashed and lets the children remain in Corinth. The children later deliver a poisoned gown to Jason’s new bride that also kills the King of Corinth. Medea then kills the children. Later, she refuses to let Jason bury the bodies or say goodbye to the dead children he now loves so dearly. Jason is cursed with many catastrophic flaws that lead to his downfall and that of others around him.
Aphrodite, caring for only Jason, causes Medea to fall in love with him because of her known magical talents. To help Jason, Medea kills her own brother, betting that her father would stop for her brother’s body parts and allow her escape with Jason. While her escape plan works due to her innate sense of the way people react, Medea is now homeless. Still, the society expected Medea to give up everything for Jason, while he was allowed to ditch her with no social consequences. “And she herself helped Jason in every way. This is indeed the greatest salvation of all,-For the wife not to stand apart from the husband.” (Medea, pg. 616, line
The stories characters, Medea and Jason, can be seen as representations of two different responses to life. For hundreds of years, society has judged each others actions and reactions based on just cause. This story, to me, has a type of underlying theme that drags the reader into a moral debate, which forces you to really question your own belief system.
Most readers are aware of the many famous deaths or acts of death within the Shakespearean plays. And when the main characters die in Shakespeare’s plays, indeed, the readers would categorize the play as a tragedy. The problem with any tragedy definition is that most tragic plays do not define the tragedy conditions explained or outlined by Aristotle. According to Telford (1961), a tragedy is a literary work that describes the downfall of an honorable, main character who is involved on historically or socially significant events. The main character, or tragic hero, has a tragic fault, the quality that leads to his or her own destruction. In reading Aristotle’s point of view, a tragedy play is when the main character(s) are under enormous pressure and are incapable to see the dignities in human life, which Aristotle’s ideas of tragedy is based on Oedipus the King. Shakespeare had a different view of tragedy. In fact, Shakespeare believed tragedy is when the hero is simply and solely destroyed. Golden (1984) argued the structure of Shakespearean tragedy would be that individual characters revolved around some pain and misery.
Aristotle states that "For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all.
With this in mind, many believe that King Oedipus in Sophocles’ play, Oedipus the King, is the perfect example of Aristotle’s tragic hero. Does he, however, truly fulfill all the “requirements” described in Poetics or is there something we miss in the depths of his fascinating and multi-faceted character that does not fit into Aristotle’s template? Without a doubt, Oe...
In the beginning of the play, we learn that Medea along with her two children have been abandoned by Jason. Jason is Medea’s husband who leaves her to be with the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. Jason knows that by being with his daughter he will one day be able to achieve power and glory. The decision by Jason to leave Medea for Creon daughter is optimally the quarter stone for Medea’s quest for revenge. There are a few conversations in the play between Medea and Jason, which shows Jason does still have some feelings for Medea. They also show his true love for his two children, but Jason’s lust for power and glory is seen as the most important thing. He makes excuses for abandoning his family by saying: he is doing this for the best interest of them. Although the reader can conclude that he is doing this for his own best interest. Jason seems to have no realization of how truly mad Medea has become for him leaving her. Media’s love and devotion towards Jason controls her life. Jason’s decision to leave her optimally turns Media into a sociopath. With this state of mind, Medea optimally...
Aristotle. "Poetics." In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.
In Aristotle’s book, Poetics, he defines tragedy as, “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and possessing magnitude; in embellished language, each kind of which is used separately in the different parts; in the mode of action and not narrated; and effecting through pity and fear” (Aristotle 1149). Tragedy creates a cause and effect chain of actions that clearly gives the audience ideas of possible events. The six parts to Aristotle’s elements of tragedy are: Plot, character, language, thought, spectacle, and melody. According to Aristotle, the most important element is the plot. Aristotle writes in Poetics that, “It is not for the purpose of presenting their characters that the agents engage in action, but rather it is for the sake of their actions that they take on the characters they have” (Aristotle 1150). Plots should have a beginning, middle, and end that have a unity of actions throughout the play making it complete. In addition, the plot should be complex making it an effective tragedy. The second most important element is character. Characters...
Mrs. Compson only showed her love for Jason, even though Jason is perhaps the worst of the children. Mrs. Compson only trusted Jason out of all four of her children. Jason took advantage of his mother and stole large amounts of money from his mother. Jason doesn’t really care about anyone, but himself.