Prompt:
Select a novel, play, or epic poem that features a character whose origins are unusual or mysterious. Then write an essay in which you analyze how these origins shape the character and that character's relationships, and how the origins contribute to the meaning of the work as a whole.
Essay:
There's no other character who is shaped by their unusual origins than Medea, the titular character from Euripides' play, Medea.
Medea is different from the other characters in the play in that she is not native to Greece. When Jason had sailed across the Mediterranean to retrieve the Golden Fleece, he encountered Medea during his travels. Medea, due to the intervention of the love goddess Aphrodite, became smitten with Jason and would become one of the [sic] his key allies. Medea, while helping Jason escape from her family, would kill her brother and cast his remains into the sea, forcing Jason's persuers [sic] to instead search for her brother's remains instead of chasing Jason. This, naturally, estranged Medea from the rest of her family.
To Medea, however, this estrangement was a worthy price to pay as long as she can stay with her love, Jason. The two would eventually marry and have two children. Jason would, however, cheat on Medea and married another women [sic] as well: The princess of the city Medea and Jason lived in. This is when Medea's backstory relevant [sic]: As an outsider whom others considered to be a "barbarian", Medea was generally looked down upon by others. Additionally, she was a women with magical powers and a clever mind which made her an uniquely powerful threat to a predominantly patriarchal society. Medea's powers, her status as an outsider, and her gender all made Medea an outcast among her peers.
This status as an outcast, and her existence threatening the power structure of the patrarchal [sic] society Medea lives in, would define how Medea interacts towards the rest of the play's cast. Among the male members, the king fears Medea for the perceived threat she is towards the king, causing the king to order Medea's exile. Aegeus, though he would provide Medea shelter after her plot to exact revenge is enacted, sees Medea mostly as a tool to help overcome his fertility problems and is reluctant to actively assist Medea in escaping. Both of these characters have a fairly frosty relationship with Medea, but the character with the frostiest relationship with Medea is Jason himself.
Jason continually belittles Medea throughout the play by treating her reactions to Jason's cheating as nothing more than overly blown up melodrama. He acts as if his cheating on Medea is actually beneficial for Medea and outright states that he chose to marry the princess because Medea was a "barbarian" outsider. One could say that Jason represents the worst aspects of a patriarchal society: A society that allows men to freely act as they please while women are helpless and unable to make any meaningful change.
If Jason embodies the worst aspects of a patriarchan society, the Medea embodies a form of feminism considered radical for Euripides' time. Unlike the Greek chorus of women in Medea, who acknowledge the plight of women in a patriarchal but refuse to try and meaningfully change it, Medea, though not reforming society, refuses to play out the role of the passive, submissive women, that society assigns to her. Instead, she uses her gifts of manipulation and magic to directly challenge the supposed invulnerability that the patriarchs, namely Jason, appear to boast off.
Reflection:
The task on hand was to write an essay examing how the unusual/mysterious origin of a character from a specific literary work shapes that characters relationships to other characters in the work and how these origins ultimately impact the literary work's meaning.
I anticipated that I would earn a 5, as my essay relied heavily on plot summary. In addition, in hindsight there were numerous grammatical and spelling errors in my essay (which I marked with [sic]) that would certainly detract from my essay. My teacher was slightly more merciful than me, giving me a score of 5.5. Mostly, my teacher believed my essay had a slow start and was lacking in strong support for my thesis.
Compared to poetry and prose essays, open question essays, as their name implies, are the most free form of the three essays. One is not bound to a specific passage of text in a open question essay. This is its own double-edged sword. It allows one to analyze a piece of text that is comfortable to them. On the other hand, without a piece of text to reference, this means that you need to have an incredibly thorough understanding of the piece of text you're using. This would become my undoing. Though I was familiar with Medea, it had been a few weeks since I last read the text. This resulted in me forgetting various crucial details, like the name of the city Jason and Medea lived in and the specific details on Jason's affair.
Ultimately, in order for me to do better on the next open question essay, I'll have to review the literary work that I plan on using beforehand in order to ensure that I have a more solid foundation of knowledge to draw upon while writing.
