The Male Characters of Euripides
THE MALE CHARACTERS OF EURIPIDES
By EM Blaiklock MA
The new legislation must have created problems for all such homes. To say that Euripides' play is a specific protest against such social injustice is to misread his intention. To maintain that he had in view the domestic stress which the law created is to do justice justice to his realism. The warning in the theme is incidental. The characterisation in the Medea is strikingly true to life.
In the terrible portrait of the heroine herself is manifested none of that idealisation which, as we have already remarked, so frequently distinguishes Euripides' treatment of his female characters. Medea stands with Electra, as convincing in her shocking barbarity as Jason and Orestes. She is undoubtedly the central figure of the play. Jason is simply her foil, and a study of the male portraiture of this drama must be undertaken with awareness of that fact. The approach has its own peculiar interest. It sets in relief the satire which so often goes with realism, for Jason is the study, more Euripideo, of a hero, ten years after. The prince of navigators, explorer of strange seas, is shown middle-aged and preoccupied, at last, with comfort and security. He has outgrown romance and far adventuring.
The mariage de convenance in Corinth is a path to ease, and, in a male and civilised society, an escape from a reproach. The mood of the young hero who went once to Colchis may have matched the fervour of the foreign woman who became his bride, but the yoke is now unequal. In the restless days of wandering Medea's stormy temperament may have had its exotic charm, but, settled now in cultured society, and more appreciative with the passing years of what its polite order had to give, Jason had become embarrassingly aware of the incongruity of his ménage. Corinth had prizes to offer, and the woman of his youth was no help in winning them. Love of safety can destroy the finest qualities of the spirit, and such is the ruin in which Jason is shown. Life in its justice was demanding the payment of a debt. As Medea had once sacrificed, for his sake, what Colchis held, so now Jason is asked to make his loyal return, and give up what Corinth held for her sake. The crisis has judged the man. Had he, by slow corruption come to this? Nemo repente turpissimus. Or had he always been thus, his glory owed in truth to the arms that manned the Argo, or to the one whose spells had won salvation and the Fleece?
The drama gives no answer. The Jason of the present is a cruel enough revelation. Thus souls can die, and what profit then, if the whole world be gained? Such was the situation which Euripides read from experience into the legend at his hand.
Whether such characterisation is to be described as satirical depends somewhat upon the point of view. It is possible indeed, to see in Jason that which is truly and essentially tragic. Beaumont maintains that a sense of insecurity is in some way always characteristic of the tragic hero. This is most conspicuously true of Jason. The fact that a form of ambition can be derived from this complex is illustrated as clearly in him as it is in Hamlet. So, too, his "masculinity' finds its psychological explanation. His desire for the elimination of Medea from his life and his acquiescence in her exile, could be related to his struggle for a sense of safety, of 'superiority'. These marks are very clear in Euripides' picture of the man, and suggest some subtlety of observation. The poet, at any rate, had no means of building the character synthetically from the recorded facts of human behaviour. His method was analysis, and his raw material could only have been the realities of life. One's view of Jason will, therefore, vary. Democritus is said to have been unable to restrain his laughter at the spectacle of humanity..
Heracleitus could not hold his tears, and it was Horace Walpole who remarked that life is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel. Euripides, according to Aristophanes, did make people think. To this extent he is a satirist.
How deeply he felt, how deeply he made and still makes others feel is the lesson of more than one of his plays, and one of the reasons for their persistent popularity.