2022 IB Diploma Extended Essays

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their expectations of Medea to move past what happened more than the oaths between Jason and Medea. This could stem from the religious beliefs of society in Ancient Greece, whereas, currently in the United Kingdom, over half of Britons say they do not belong to any religion (Dinic, 2020), and the remaining 45% belong to many different religions. Due to these clashes of belief systems in Bartlett’s Medea , her society instead values the gendered nature of its individuals. Emotions Ancient Greece had a bipartite gendered division of emotions, where men were expected to only express anger and bravery, and women were expected to sadness, jealousy and cowardice. This stems from the way the Ancients did not separate emotions from reason, and reasoned that men and women were entirely different, and so must experience different emotions (Allard & Montlahuc, 2018). Allard and Montlahuc stressed the importance of understanding that it was not the emotions themselves which were gendered, but rather the way they were expressed or how they were dealt with by Greek society (Allard & Montlahuc, 2018). Through the emotions experienced by Medea, Euripides attempts to reverse the stereotypical gender roles of the characters, by allowing Medea to express more externalising negative emotions such as anger and bravery. Medea expresses feelings of anger towards Jason throughout the entire play, referring to him as an ‘unspeakable wretch’ (line 467) and ‘unfeeling monster’ (line 489). Euripides only challenges these gender stereotypes to a particular degree, as he still enables Medea to experience the sadness and cowardice of a stereotypical woman of the time, qualifying Medea as neither man nor woman, simply as a human being. Upon deciding to murder of her children, Medea has a lengthy monologue