medea theme essay

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In Euripides' Medea , exile is a past reality, an impending threat, and an internal state. Medea and Jason are exiles before the action of Euripides' play begins. In the play's backstory, Medea was forced to flee from her homeland of Clochis for helping Jason to secure the Golden Fleece. Then Jason and she together were exiled as murderers from Jason's homeland of Iolcus because of Medea's attempt to wrest ruling power for her and…

Truth vs. Rhetoric

The tragedy of Medea is woven out of a series of deceitful, true-seeming monologues. After acknowledging to the chorus (and the audience) her desire to kill Creon and destroy his house, Medea convinces him that she should be allowed to remain for just one day to make provisions for her children . Medea actually plans to kill her children, so the statement is ironic. Even if the audience didn't know this at the outset of…

The Roles of Men and Women

The events of Medea take place in a male-dominated society, a society that allows Jason and Creon to casually and brutally shunt Medea aside. The play is an exploration of the roles of men and women, both actual and ideal, but it is not necessarily an argument for sexual equality. Creon and Jason find Medea 's cleverness more dangerous and frightening because she is woman. "A sharp tempered woman…" Creon says, "Is easier to deal…

Justice and Natural Law

Natural Law—the idea of a moral code integral to and inseparable from whatever it is that makes us human—is tested in the events of Medea when characters make decisions contrary to their nature, when Jason , a husband, abandons his wife or when Medea , a mother, murders her children . Medea's decision to kill her children, even as a form of retribution, was as shocking to the ancient Athenians as it is to us…

The fundamental conflict between Medea and Jason is that she believes she has been faithfully devoted to him while he has not fulfilled his duties as a husband or as a man. "Why is there no mark on men's bodies," Medea says, "By which we could know the true ones from the false ones?" But Jason isn't the only one with duties— the servants have a duty to their masters, Creon is obliged to faithfully…

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Medea / Themes

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

I n Medea , several major themes emerge, each exploring different facets of the human experience and shedding light on the complexities of the play. These themes include betrayal, revenge, gender roles, the power of passion, and the clash between personal desires and societal expectations. Each of these themes adds depth and complexity to the tragedy, inviting the audience to contemplate the moral, social, and psychological dimensions of the characters’ experiences. They reflect the timeless nature of the play, allowing for a deeper understanding of the human condition and the intricate web of emotions and motivations that drive our actions.

Betrayal serves as a central theme in Medea . Jason’s betrayal of Medea, his wife, by divorcing her in favor of a political marriage with Glauce, the daughter of King Creon, fuels the intense emotions and actions that unfold throughout the play. Medea’s sense of betrayal is deepened by the fact that she sacrificed everything for Jason, including leaving her homeland and committing acts of violence on his behalf. The theme of betrayal highlights the fragility of trust in relationships and the profound impact it can have on individuals, driving them to extreme measures.

The theme of revenge is intertwined with Medea’s response to Jason’s betrayal. Medea’s desire for vengeance consumes her and propels her to commit heinous acts, including the murder of Glauce and her own children. The play explores the destructive power of revenge and its ability to cloud judgment and lead to irreversible consequences. It raises questions about the nature of justice, the ethics of seeking revenge, and the limits of human actions driven by deep emotional pain.

Gender Roles

Medea challenges the traditional gender roles and expectations prevalent in ancient Greek society. Medea, as a woman, defies the norms of her time. She is a powerful and intelligent character who challenges the submissive role assigned to women. The play examines the tension between the patriarchal society and the agency of women, highlighting the struggles and limitations imposed upon them. Medea’s rebellion against societal norms serves as a critique of the restrictive gender roles and offers a portrayal of a woman who refuses to be silenced.

• See also: “ A Note on Medea ”

The Power of Passion

Passion, particularly the destructive power of unrestrained emotions, is a significant theme in Medea . Medea’s intense love for Jason turns into seething hatred and fuels her revenge. The play explores the overwhelming force of emotions, the consequences of unchecked passion, and the transformative effects it can have on individuals. It serves as a cautionary tale, reminding us of the destructive potential when powerful emotions are left unchecked.

Personal Desires Versus Societal Expectations

Medea examines the conflict between personal desires and societal expectations. Medea's actions defy the expectations placed upon her as a wife and a mother. She prioritizes her personal desires for revenge over the traditional roles and obligations assigned to women. The play raises questions about the tensions between individual freedom and societal constraints, highlighting the challenges individuals face when they go against established norms and conventions.

Medea employs various motifs throughout the play to enhance its themes and add layers of meaning to the narrative. These motifs include the concepts of exile and home, the power of rhetoric and manipulation, the motif of the outsider or foreigner, and the symbolism of the natural world.

Exile and Home

The motif of exile and home resonates strongly in Medea . Medea herself is an exile, having left her homeland of Colchis to be with Jason in Corinth. The play delves into the sense of displacement and the longing for a true home. Medea’s exile represents her loss of identity and stability, and it intensifies her feelings of betrayal and isolation. The motif of exile explores the profound impact of being uprooted from one’s homeland and the longing for a sense of belonging.

Power of Rhetoric and Manipulation

The motif of rhetoric and manipulation is significant in the tragedy. Medea demonstrates her mastery of persuasive language and rhetoric, using it as a tool to influence and manipulate others. She skillfully employs her words to deceive, convince, and gain the upper hand in her pursuit of revenge. This motif highlights the power of language and the ways in which it can be used to shape perceptions, manipulate emotions, and ultimately drive the course of events.

The Outsider or Foreigner

The motif of the outsider or foreigner is intricately woven into the fabric of the play. Medea is depicted as an outsider in Corinth, both as a foreigner from Colchis and as a woman who defies societal norms. Her foreign status and her unconventional behavior contribute to the tension and conflict within the play. This motif explores the challenges faced by those who are marginalized or excluded from the dominant social order, highlighting the clash between different cultures and the struggle for acceptance.

Symbolism of the Natural World

The natural world is symbolically significant in Medea . Imagery and references to natural elements, such as storms, the sea, and poison, are employed to mirror the emotional turmoil and chaos unfolding within the characters. The use of natural symbolism reflects the power and unpredictability of human emotions and highlights the uncontrollable forces at play in the tragic events of the story. It adds depth and richness to the play, connecting the human experience to the larger natural order.

Medea incorporates various symbols that enrich the play’s themes and deepen its symbolic resonance. These symbols include the golden fleece, the poisoned crown and robe, the chariot of the Sun god Helios, and the children.

Golden Fleece

The golden fleece symbolizes Medea’s origins and her connection to her homeland of Colchis. It represents her past, her power, and her knowledge of magic and witchcraft. The golden fleece also serves as a reminder of Medea’s strength and resourcefulness, as it was through her assistance that Jason obtained the fleece in the mythical quest. The symbol of the golden fleece underscores Medea’s role as a powerful and formidable character, and it highlights her agency and potential for both good and evil.

Poisoned Crown and Robe

The poisoned crown and robe are significant symbols in the play, representing Medea’s calculated and diabolical plan for revenge. These items, sent as a gift to Glauce, are tainted with a deadly poison that ultimately leads to her demise. The poisoned crown and robe symbolize the destructive power of vengeance and the consequences of unchecked rage. They highlight the tragic course of events set in motion by Medea’s desire for retribution.

Chariot of the Sun God Helios

The chariot of the Sun god Helios serves as a symbolic element in Medea , representing the realm of the divine and the supernatural. Medea seeks sanctuary in the chariot of Helios, her grandfather, after committing her atrocious acts, emphasizing her connection to the gods and her ability to transcend mortal limitations. The chariot symbolizes Medea’s extraordinary power and her potential to transcend the human realm. It also suggests a divine intervention in the course of events, adding a layer of cosmic significance to the play.

The Children

The children, particularly Medea’s two sons, hold immense symbolic weight in the play. They represent innocence, vulnerability, and the bonds of familial love. The presence of the children intensifies the tragedy as Medea is faced with the agonizing decision of sacrificing them to exact her revenge. The children symbolize the devastating consequences of Medea’s actions, highlighting the tragic conflict between maternal love and the pursuit of justice. Their presence evokes a profound sense of loss and underscores the irreparable damage caused by unchecked vengeance.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Euripides’ Medea

Analysis of Euripides’ Medea

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 13, 2020 • ( 0 )

When Medea, commonly regarded as Euripides’ masterpiece, was first per-formed at Athens’s Great Dionysia, Euripides was awarded the third (and last) prize, behind Sophocles and Euphorion. It is not difficult to understand why. Euripides violates its audience’s most cherished gender and moral illusions, while shocking with the unimaginable. Arguably for the first time in Western drama a woman fully commanded the stage from beginning to end, orchestrating the play’s terrifying actions. Defying accepted gender assumptions that prescribed passive and subordinate roles for women, Medea combines the steely determination and wrath of Achilles with the wiles of Odysseus. The first Athenian audience had never seen Medea’s like before, at least not in the heroic terms Euripides treats her. After Jason has cast off Medea—his wife, the mother of his children, and the woman who helped him to secure the Golden Fleece and eliminate the usurper of Jason’s throne at Iolcus—in order to marry the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, Medea responds to his betrayal by destroying all of Jason’s prospects as a husband, father, and presumptive heir to a powerful throne. She causes a horrible death of Jason’s intended, Glauce, and Creon, who tries in vain to save his daughter. Most shocking of all, and possibly Euripides’ singular innovation to the legend, Medea murders her two sons, allowing her vengeful passion to trump and cancel her maternal affections. Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’s Oresteia conspires to murder her husband as well, but she is in turn executed by her son, Orestes, whose punishment is divinely and civilly sanctioned by the trilogy’s conclusion. Medea, by contrast, adds infanticide to her crimes but still escapes Jason’s vengeance or Corinthian justice on a flying chariot sent by the god Helios to assist her. Medea, triumphant after the carnage she has perpetrated, seemingly evades the moral consequences of her actions and is shown by Euripides apotheosized as a divinely sanctioned, supreme force. The play simultaneously and paradoxically presents Medea’s claim on the audience’s sympathy as a woman betrayed, as a victim of male oppression and her own divided nature, and as a monster and a warning. Medea frightens as a female violator and overreacher who lets her passion overthrow her reason, whose love is so massive and all-consuming that it is transformed into self-destructive and boundless hatred. It is little wonder that Euripides’ defiance of virtually every dramatic and gender assumption of his time caused his tragedy to fail with his first critics. The complexity and contradictions of Medea still resonate with audiences, while the play continues to unsettle and challenge. Medea, with literature’s most titanic female protagonist, remains one of drama’s most daring assaults on an audience’s moral sensibility and conception of the world.

Euripides is ancient Greek drama’s great iconoclast, the shatterer of consoling illusions. With Euripides, the youngest of the three great Athenian tragedians of the fifth century b.c., Attic drama takes on a disturbingly recognizable modern tone. Regarded by Aristotle as “the most tragic of the poets,” Euripides provided deeply spiritual, moral, and psychological explorations of exceptional and domestic life at a time when Athenian confidence and certainty were moving toward breakup. Mirroring this gathering doubt and anxiety, Euripides reflects the various intellectual, cultural, and moral controversies of his day. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that the world after Athens’s golden age in the fifth century became Euripidean, as did the drama that responded to it. In several senses, therefore, it is Euripides whom Western drama can claim as its central progenitor.

Euripides wrote 92 plays, of which 18 have survived, by far the largest number of works by the great Greek playwrights and a testimony both to the accidents of literary survival and of his high regard by following generations. An iconoclast in his life and his art, Euripides set the prototype for the modern alienated artist in opposition. By contrast to Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides played no public role in the life of his times. An intellectual and artist who wrote in isolation (tradition says in a cave in his native Salamis), his plays won the first prize at Athens’s annual Great Dionysia only four times, and his critics, particularly Aristophanes, took on Euripides as a frequent tar-get. Aristophanes charged him with persuading his countrymen that the gods did not exist, with debunking the heroic, and with teaching moral degeneration that transformed Athenians into “marketplace loungers, tricksters, and scoundrels.” Euripides’ immense reputation and influence came for the most part only after his death, when the themes and innovations he pioneered were better appreciated and his plays eclipsed in popularity those of all of the other great Athenian playwrights.

Critic Eric Havelock has summarized the Euripidean dramatic revolution as “putting on stage rooms never seen before.” Instead of a palace’s throne room, Euripides takes his audience into the living room and presents the con-fl icts and crises of characters who resemble not the heroic paragons of Aeschylus and Sophocles but the audience themselves—mixed, fallible, contradictory, and vulnerable. As Aristophanes accurately points out, Euripides brought to the stage “familiar affairs” and “household things.” Euripides opened up drama for the exploration of central human and social questions embedded in ordinary life and human nature. The essential component of all Euripides’ plays is a challenging reexamination of orthodoxy and conventional beliefs. If the ways of humans are hard to fathom in Aeschylus and Sophocles, at least the design and purpose of the cosmos are assured, if not always accepted. For Euripides, the ability of the gods and the cosmos to provide certainty and order is as doubtful as an individual’s preference for the good. In Euripides’ cosmogony, the gods resemble those of Homer’s, full of pride, passion, vindictiveness, and irrational characteristics that pattern the world of humans. Divine will and order are most often in Euripides’ dramas replaced by a random fate, and the tragic hero is offered little consolation as the victim of forces that are beyond his or her control. Justice is shown as either illusory or a delusion, and the myths are brought down to the level of the familiar and the recognizable. Euripides has been described as drama’s first great realist, the playwright who relocated tragic action to everyday life and portrayed gods and heroes with recognizable human and psychological traits. Aristotle related in the Poetics that “Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.” Because Euripides’ characters offer us so many contrary aspects and are driven by both the rational and the irrational, the playwright earns the distinction of being considered the first great psychological artist in the modern sense, due to his awareness of the complex motives and ambiguities that make up human identity and determine behavior.

Tragedy: An Introduction

Euripides is also one of the first playwrights to feature heroic women at the center of the action. Medea dominates the stage as no woman character had ever done before. The play opens with Medea’s nurse confirming how much Medea is suffering from Jason’s betrayal and the tutor of Medea’s children revealing that Creon plans to banish Medea and her two sons from Corinth. Medea’s first words are an offstage scream and curse as she hears the news of Creon’s judgment. The Nurse’s sympathetic reaction to Medea’s misery sounds the play’s dominant theme of the danger of passion overwhelming reason, judgment, and balance, particularly in a woman like Medea, unschooled in suffering and used to commanding rather than being commanded. Better, says the Nurse, to have no part of greatness or glory: “The middle way, neither high nor low is best. . . . Good never comes from overreaching.” Medea then takes the stage to win the sympathy of the Chorus, made up of Corinthian women. Her opening speech has been described as one of literature’s earliest feminist manifestos, in which she declares, “Of all creatures on earth, we women are the most wretched,” and goes on to attack dowries that purchase husbands in exchange for giving men ownership of women’s bodies and fate, arranged marriages, and the double standard:

When a man grows tired of his wife and home, He is free to look about for someone new. We wives are forced to count on just one man. They say, we live safe at home while men go to battle. I’d rather stand three times in the front line than bear one child!

Medea wins the Chorus’s complicit silence on her intended intrigue to avenge herself on Jason and their initial sympathy as an aggrieved woman. She next confronts Creon to persuade him to postpone his banishment order for one day so she can arrange a destination and some support for her children. Medea’s servility and deference to Creon and the sentimental appeal she mounts on behalf of her children gain his concession. After he departs, Medea reveals her deception of and contempt for Creon, announcing that her vengeance plot now extends beyond Jason to include both Creon and his daughter.

There follows the first of three confrontational scenes between Medea and Jason, the dramatic core of the play. Euripides presents Jason as a selfsatisfied rationalist, smoothly and complacently justifying the violations of his love and obligation to Medea as sensible, accepted expedience. Jason asserts that his self-interest and ambition for wealth and power are superior claims over his affection, loyalty, and duty to the woman who has betrayed her parents, murdered her brother, exiled herself from her home, and conspired for his sake. Medea rages ineffectually in response, while attempting unsuccessfully to reach Jason’s heart and break through an egotism that shows him incapable of understanding or empathy. As critic G. Norwood has observed, “Jason is a superb study—a compound of brilliant manners, stupidity, and cynicism.” In the drama’s debate between Medea and Jason, the play brilliantly sets in conflict essential polarities in the human condition, between male/female, husband/wife, reason/passion, and head/heart.

Before the second round with Jason, Medea encounters Aegeus, king of Athens, who is in search of a cure for his childlessness. Medea agrees to use her powers as a sorceress to help him in exchange for refuge in Athens. Aristotle criticized this scene as extraneous, but a case can be made that Aegeus’s despair over his lack of children gives Medea the idea that Jason’s ultimate destruction would be to leave him similarly childless. The evolving scheme to eliminate Jason’s intended bride and offspring sets the context for Medea’s second meeting with Jason in which she feigns acquiescence to Jason’s decision and proposes that he should keep their children with him. Jason agrees to seek Glauce’s approval for Medea’s apparent selfsacrificing generosity, and the children depart with him, carrying a poisoned wedding gift to Glauce.

First using her children as an instrument of her revenge, Medea will next manage to convince herself in the internal struggle that leads to the play’s climax that her love for her children must give way to her vengeance, that maternal affection and reason are no match for her irrational hatred. After the Tutor returns with the children and a messenger reports the horrible deaths of Glauce and Creon, Medea resolves her conflict between her love for her children and her hatred for Jason in what scholar John Ferguson has called “possibly the finest speech in all Greek tragedy.” Medea concludes her self-assessment by stating, “I know the evil that I do, but my fury is stronger than my will. Passion is the curse of man.” It is the struggle within Medea’s soul, which Euripides so powerfully dramatizes, between her all-consuming vengeance and her reason and better nature that gives her villainy such tragic status. Her children’s offstage screams finally echo Medea’s own opening agony. On stage the Chorus tries to comprehend such an unnatural crime as matricide through precedent and concludes: “What can be strange or terrible after this?” Jason arrives too late to rescue his children from the “vile murderess,” only to find Medea beyond his reach in a chariot drawn by dragons with the lifeless bodies of his sons beside her. The roles of Jason and Medea from their first encounter are here dramatically reversed: Medea is now triumphant, refusing Jason any comfort or concession, and Jason ineffectually rages and curses the gods for his destruction, now feeling the pain of losing everything he most desired, as he had earlier inflicted on Medea. “Call me lioness or Scylla, as you will,” Medea calls down to Jason, “. . . as long as I have reached your vitals.”

Medea’s titanic passions have made her simultaneously subhuman in her pitiless cruelty and superhuman in her willful, limitless strength and determination. The final scene of her escape in her god-sent flying chariot, perhaps the most famous and controversial use of the deus ex machina in drama, ultimately makes a grand theatrical, psychological, and shattering ideological point. Medea has destroyed all in her path, including her human self, to satisfy her passion, becoming at the play’s end, neither a hero nor a villain but a fear-some force of nature: irrational, impersonal, destructive power that sweeps aside human aspirations, affections, and the consoling illusions of mercy and order in the universe.

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Medea (Seneca) Themes

By lucius annaeus seneca.

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When Jason leaves Medea to marry Creusa , he effectively abandons her and their children. Having brought Medea to this foreign country, he has established her in a vulnerable position and then leaves with no explanation. Naturally she feels betrayed. In response, she concocts this scheme to make Jason pay by betraying his trust in her as well. He trusts that she will remain a good, faithful mother. She proves, step by step, that she will do anything to exact her revenge, including sacrificing her stability as a role model and even sacrificing the children themselves. This is her ultimate reciprocal betrayal, taking Jason's loved ones from him the way he removed himself from her.

Superstition

The characters of this play are deeply attune to spiritual matters. They base their decisions on both emotion and superstition, but the superstition appears to carry greater weight. After all, Medea is first feared by her new Corinthian neighbors because of her reputation with the dark arts. She's a sorceress of high merit. When she receives an oracle, she interprets the event as a threat upon her own power. She refuses to leave Corinth in order to spare her unfaithful husband, despite the dangerous promise if she doesn't. Ultimately, Medea fulfills the prophecy by killing her own children, proving her emotions less powerful than fate.

Displacement

Medea's primary dilemma in this play is not so much her husband's disloyalty but her own displacement. As a foreigner, she is lonely and upset. Her entire world has been radically transformed by her love for Jason which led her to Corinth, but now that he has abandoned her she is painfully conscious of how lost she feels. When Creon threatens her with exile, he effectively confirms a secret suspicion -- she will never feel at home again. This displacement morphs in Medea's mind into a kind of desperation which corrupts her mind and decision making. She starts believing that she has nothing to lose and thus kills her sons and betrays her husband, fulfilling her own worst fear. In the end, she does leave Corinth.

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Medea (Seneca) Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for Medea (Seneca)

Medea (Seneca) study guide contains a biography of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Medea (Seneca)
• Medea (Seneca) Summary
• Character List

Essays for Medea (Seneca)

Medea (Seneca) essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Medea by Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

• Formal Comparison of Euripides' and Seneca's Versions of 'Medea'

Wikipedia Entries for Medea (Seneca)

• Introduction

1997.07.19, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art

Joachim vogeler , louisana state university, [email protected].

As James Clauss reminds us in the preface, this excellent collection of twelve essays on Medea grew out of a panel organized by Sarah Johnston for the 1991 meeting of the American Philological Association in Chicago. An excellent introduction by Sarah Johnston outlines the scope of this collection and provides a superb and concise summary of the twelve essays on Medea. According to Johnston, “Medea was represented by the Greeks as a complex figure, fraught with conflicting desires and exhibiting an extraordinary range of behavior” (6). After sketching Medea’s mythic history from antiquity to the twentieth century and her reception in literary and art history, Johnston explores how Medea’s complexity continues to challenge our imaginations, confront our deepest feelings, and make us realize “that behind the delicate order we have sought to impose upon our world lurks chaos” (17). Without specifying to which theories in the field of psychology she is referring, Johnston elaborates on the dichotomy of self and other which she identifies as a common element in many of the essays. A complex Medea figure unites “the opposing concepts of self and other, as she veers between desirable and undesirable behavior, between Greek and foreigner; it also allows [authors and artists] to raise the disturbing possibility of otherness lurking within self —the possibility that the ‘normal’ carry within themselves the potential for abnormal behavior, that the boundaries expected to keep our world safe are not impermeable” (8). The juxtaposition of self and other serves as the theoretical background against which Johnston contrasts the twelve essays of this collection.

In part one, entitled “Mythic Representations,” the first four essays trace the possible origins and developments of Medea as mythological figure. In part two, entitled “Literary Portraits,” the next four essays focus on the Medea figure in Pindar, Euripides, Apollonius, and Ovid. Part three, “Under Philosophical Investigation,” examines the influence Medea had on ancient philosophers who dealt with the effects of passion on the human psyche. The fourth and final part, “Beyond the Euripidean Stage,” features the influence of Euripides’ Medea on ancient vase painting and the modern stage. The editors should also be commended for compiling a very useful and extensive bibliography of almost all works cited in the papers, an index locorum, and a general index. This collection of essays on Medea displays an amazing coherence for an endeavor of this kind, and paints a very coherent and complex picture of an influential mythological figure. Most authors in this collection also make illuminating cross-references to the essays of their fellow contributors. As with any well researched project on a literary theme, scholars as well as students ought to be very pleased with a most up-to-date publication such as this 1997 work. My only point of criticism would be to note that a project taking such a comprehensive approach should be familiar with the work of Jacques Lacan, and that it would have been helpful if the editors had included a psychoanalytic investigation of Medea’s passion. Nonetheless, I expect the present volume to become a standard textbook and an obvious starting point for any students of the Medea figure. A brief survey of the twelve essays will demonstrate the scope and the quality of this project.

Fritz Graf, known for his introduction to Greek Mythology (1993), opens part one of this collection on “Mythic Representations” with an essay entitled “Medea, the Enchantress from Afar: Remarks on a Well-Known Myth.” Distinguishing between “vertical tradition” (different versions of the same mythic episode, developed over the course of centuries) and “horizontal tradition” (different versions of the same mythic episode within the same time frame), Graf furnishes an overview of Medea’s episodes in Colchis, Iolcus, Corinth, Athens, and Persia. After analyzing the themes and variations within both of these traditions and noting the consistencies and tensions between them, Graf identifies two unifying elements that tie together all the stories about Medea: her foreigness and her initiatory role. “[S]he is a foreigner, who lives outside of the known world or comes to a city from outside; each time she enters a city where she dwells, she comes from a distant place, and when she leaves the city, she again goes to a distant place” (38). Medea’s representation as the other corresponds with Johnston’s introductory remarks that, as “a geographical and cultural stranger … repeatedly exiled within Greece,” Medea implicitly demonstrates how the outsider, the other, is a threat to the inside, to the self” (14). In Graf’s second unifying theme, he identifies Medea as being “connected with a whole line of narratives that clearly are associated with initiation rites” (42). We can understand Medea as “initiatrix” when she helps Jason to overcome the dangers he must undergo in his “initiation ritual” to acquire the fleece and claim the throne back home.

In “Corinthian Medea and the Cult of Hera Akraia,” Sarah Johnston argues that no single author invented the image of the murderous mother and that fifth-century authors inherited an infanticidal Medea from the mythical tradition. This mythical figure may have been an earlier goddess of the Corinthians who “evolved out of a paradigm found in the folk beliefs of Greece and many other Mediterranean cultures—the reproductive demon, who persecuted pregnant women and young children” (14). According to Johnston, the paradigm of the reproductive demon “is likely to have been associated with the Corinthian cult of Hera Akraia” (45). As a mother who lost her children because of Hera’s refusal to protect them and help nurture them to maturity, Corinthian Medea originally emblematized the results of Hera’s neglect and/or anger (64). According to Johnston, this loss would have caused Medea to become a reproductive demon that killed other mothers’ children. At the end of Johnston’s stimulating essay, however, she has to admit that the specific reasons why the Colchian and Corinthian Medea were joined together are beyond our secure recovery (67). In an excellent essay on “Medea as Foundation-Heroine,” Nita Krevans explores Medea’s role as founder of cities. With foundations in antiquity centering primarily on male founders, the traditional roles for heroines in myth include “that of the eponymous nymph, who brings to life the metaphor of woman-as-landscape” (72), “that of the dynastic heroine, mother of a founder or of a line of local rulers” (73), and that of “the missing girl … sought by a male kinsman (or kinsmen)” (74). Often foundations are associated with a mother’s heroic child, leaving little more than a footnote for heroines. Although some foundation stories portray Medea in these traditional roles, other appearances “form a striking exception when seen against this backdrop…. [F]or every version in which she seems to follow the normal scheme, there is a variant that portrays her as a defiant anomaly” (75). With the foundation of Tomi, for example, which is associated with Apsyrtus, “we arrive at a complete inversion of the ‘kidnapped heroine’ motif” (78). Medea is the kidnapping sister, not the victim. The inversion of the gender roles sees the female as kidnapper and the male as helpless victim. Likewise, (female) Medea appears as a powerful prophet of divine status who instructs future (male) settlers about the location and destiny of their colony (78-79). The presentation of Medea in powerful, masculine roles is virtually incompatible with female fertility (80). Although Medea’s prophetic powers and divine attributes challenge the traditional boundaries between male and female, most foundation tales focus on Medea’s “extraordinary capacity for destruction” which make her “a heroine not of foundation but of annihilation” (82). Jan Bremmer’s essay asks: “Why Did Medea Kill Her Brother Apsyrtus?” rather than any other family member. After examining the specifics of this “treacherous, sacrilegious, and brutal murder” (88) as it has been described in various ancient sources, Bremmer conducts a detailed comparison of Greek sibling relationships. He concludes that brother-brother relationships and sister-sister relationships were not as close as brother-sister relationships, and it was the opposite-sex relationships on which the Greeks placed the greatest importance. In ancient (and in contemporary) Greece, “brothers [are] supposed to guard the honor, and in particular the sexual honor, of their sisters” (95). Compared with same sex sibling relationships, “brother-sister conflicts are very rare in Greek Myth” (96) and the “close contact between sisters and brothers must have continued even after the sister’s marriage” (95). “[T]he brother was responsible for the sister, and she was dependent upon him” (100). Medea’s murder of her brother Apsyrtus had such a great impact because “Medea not only committed the heinous act of spilling family blood, she also permanently severed all ties to her natal home and the role that it would normally play in her adult life. Through Apsyrtus’ murder, she simultaneously declared her independence from her family and forfeited her right to any protection from it…. There was only one way for Medea to go, then: she had to follow Jason and never look back” (100). Bremmer concludes his convincing analysis with the assumption that Medea’s fratricide elicited great feelings of horror from the Greek audience—because we hardly find any artistic representations of Apsyrtus’ murder on Greek vases (100). In “Medea as Muse: Pindar’s Pythian 4,” Dolores M. O’Higgins suggests that Pindar presents Medea as a muselike figure. In archaic Greece, people distrusted human and divine females (103-104). “For the Greeks all women were no less than a race apart. Medea most fully exemplifies the potential disloyalty present in all wives, living as necessary but suspect aliens in their husbands’ houses” (122). Foreign, female intelligence—both Medea’s and that of the Muse—had to be appropriated before the male hero, Jason, or the male poet, Pindar, could use it to his own advantage (107-108). “Traditionally, the process of song making,” O’Higgins explains, “was a joint effort…. The human bard requires a song of the Muses” (108). Pindar relied on female Muses, to create his song, and at the same time, the Muses had the capacity to dangerously intoxicate or even paralyze the poet or his audience (110). For a fuller understanding of Pythian 4, it is important to realize that Pindar also presents Medea as powerful, prophetic female, “a Muse of sorts” (114). Pindar changes the traditional parameters of the poet “as the passive vessel for information” (117), and he appropriates his Muse by basically telling her what to sing about. Pindar also appropriates Medea, the former Colchian “Muse,” who first immobilized Jason’s opponents, but then has herself fallen victim to the poetic skills of Jason—or Pindar, as O’Higgins suggests (123). “Jason ultimately may have failed in harnessing the supernatural abilities of Medea, but Pindar has not; he tames the dangerous Muse,” O’Higgins concludes (126). In “Becoming Medea: Assimilation in Euripides,” Deborah Boedeker observes that the Medea figure was not yet firmly established when Euripides composed his play. “Besides the deliberate infanticide, alternative Medeas were still possible” (127), and even within a single episode, an author was able to and ultimately had to make choices in motivating and designing the story line. Boedeker suggests that Euripides gives his protagonist her overpowering presence and canonical status by employing poetic mechanisms, namely a series of similes and metaphors, to categorize his heroine initially. During the course of the play, “Medea is gradually dissociated from such apparently obvious definitions of what she is … [and] subtly assimilated to several figures in her own story, such as Aphrodite, Jason, and the princess” (128). Medea’s implicit assimilation to other figures by mutual resemblances in diction and action gives her “an almost unbearably focused power and allows her action a certain claim to reciprocal justice” (148). “She destroys her enemies by becoming more like them, ruins them for being too much like herself. Ultimately Euripides’ Medea expands to the point where she obliterates the other characters in her myth, fully transcending—and eradicating—her own once-limited identity as woman, wife, mother, mortal” (148). Medea’s self has been consumed by the other, Johnston concludes in her introduction (11), the former victim has turned victimizer—a development for which we can both pity and fear Medea. In “Conquest of the Mephistophelian Nausicaa: Medea’s Role in Apollonius’ Redefinition of the Epic Hero,” James J. Clauss argues persuasively that Apollonius assigns Jason to the traditional role of hero, and that Medea usurps the role of “helper-maiden,” contributing to the Argonautic expedition by helping him to complete the contest (149-150). Jason, however, is not an independent hero like Heracles, who completes his contests by himself, but “thoroughly dependent on the assistance of others” (151). Jason’s brand of leadership and heroism finds its expression in “his ability to make deals with foreigners” (155). Comparing Jason and Medea to Odysseus and Nausicaa, Clauss demonstrates that Jason’s contest is not of a military kind; Medea represents his real contest and she is completely charmed by Jason’s beauty and his diplomatic skills: “To conquer Medea is to win the fleece, the opposite of the usual folktale motif, which has the young hero perform the contest to win the bride” (167). The often clueless and all too ordinary Jason ultimately succeeds as he secures the golden fleece but Apollonius’ heroism is of a different kind, with a Jason relying heavily on Medea as a powerful and indispensable “helper-maiden” (175). The implicit comparison with Nausicaa reveals Medea’s otherness who “possesses the ability to create a Heracles or destroy a man of bronze” (176). Carole E. Newlands takes a comparative approach in analyzing the dissonant structure of the full Medea story in her brilliant essay “The Metamorphosis of Ovid’s Medea.” While his Medea is initially portrayed sympathetically as a young girl whose irrational passion drives her to help Jason, in the second part of Ovid’s narrative (7.7-424), Medea appears exclusively as a witch who has lost her human characteristics. After sketching Medea’s story of the young maiden turning murderess, Newlands compares the bipartite structure of Ovid’s narrative with other marriage tales in Metamorphoses 6, 7, and 8. By juxtaposing the myths of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus (6.424-676), Scylla and Minos (8.1-151), Procris and Cephalus (7.694-862), and Boreas and Orthyia (6.677-721) with the myth of Medea, Ovid approaches urgent moral issues and offers us varying studies of the female as victim and criminal without making moral judgments. “By splitting the Medea of the Metamorphoses into two incompatible types, Ovid suggests the difficulties and inconsistencies in the rewriting of the tradition (191). … But Ovid does not explain the reason for Medea’s transformation into a sorceress and semidivine, evil being” (192), he just offers us refracted images. “Ovid adds complexity to the story of Medea by juxtaposing it with stories that are simultaneously similar and different,” Newlands concludes (207). She continues by suggesting that “Ovid’s marriage group of tales illustrates how society both denies a woman power and rejects her when she uses it” (208). By presenting two very different Medeas, Ovid creates an open-ended story that leaves the ultimate judgment to the reader. John M. Dillon’s brief essay “Medea Among Philosophers” raises many questions for the reader—as Johnston acknowledges in her introduction (10)—without providing answers. Focusing on Medea 1078-1080, Dillon shows how Euripides’ text is employed in philosophical circles to buttress the argument of different philosophical schools (215). Galen and Platonist philosophers would view Medea’s subjugation of her reason to her passion as an argument that the human tripartite soul possesses an irrational part, whereas Chrysippus and the Stoics use Medea to argue for the unity of the soul (212). Medea remains “the paradigmatic example of a disordered soul” for ancient philosophers (218), Dillon concludes. Regrettably, none of the contributors to this collection employs a psychoanalytic approach in discussing Medea’s passion and the state of her soul. “Serpents in the Soul: A Reading of Seneca’s Medea ” is an abbreviated version of chapter 12 of Martha C. Nussbaum’s book The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). In her fascinating essay, Nussbaum argues that as an author Seneca is “an elusive, complex, and contradictory figure, a figure deeply committed both to Stoicism and to the world, both to purity and to the erotic” (246). While “Seneca’s Medea provides a clear expression of the strongest and least circular of the Stoic arguments against passion” (223), the play—and tragedy in general—are “profoundly committed to the values that Plato and Stoicism wish to reject” (247). Medea’s problem is not her love per se but her inappropriate, immoderate love for Jason. However, as Seneca tells us, there is “no erotic passion that reliably stops short of its own excess” (221). He questions the Aristotelian notion “that we can have passionate love in our lives and still be people of virtue and appropriate action” (220). Seneca argues that passionate love creates “a life of continued gaping openness to violation, a life in which pieces of the self are groping out into the world and pieces of the world are dangerously making their way into the insides of the self” (222). Extrapolating from this argument, Seneca’s Medea claims that love may even include the wish to kill. According to Nussbaum, it is not surprising that love, anger, and grief lie close to one another in the heart; these are all judgments, differing only in the precise content of the proposition, that ascribe so much importance to one unstable external being (228). Echoing Lacanian ideas, Nussbaum writes: “Desire is the beginning of the death of the self” (232). Two minor images, that of the bridle and the wave, and a central image, that of the snake, recur throughout Seneca’s play, exemplifying Medea’s passionate love. While love challenges the virtue of Stoic morality, either way of living, a life of love or a life of morality, seems to be imperfect. In her conclusion, Nussbaum returns to Seneca’s concept of mercy as a possible source of gentleness to both self and other, even when wrongdoing has been found—until rage gives way to understanding (248). Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood takes our heroine beyond the stage and investigates the dramatic and iconographical explorations of the Medea figure. In “Medea at a Shifting Distance: Images and Euripidean Tragedy,” Sourvinou-Inwood demonstrates how Euripides’ Athenian audience would perceive Medea’s character through a series of shifting relationships. Euripides constructed Medea’s character in the course of the tragedy using the three schemata of “normal woman,” “good woman” and bad woman” (254). These schemata were important crystallizations of the ancient assumptions that helped Euripides direct audience response (255). Euripides created the Medea figure by deploying a series of what Sourvinou-Inwood calls “zooming devices” and “distancing devices.” Noticing a difference in representations of Medea in Greek dress and oriental dress, Sourvinou-Inwood suggests that Medea was wearing Greek dress throughout Euripides’ play but oriental dress when she appeared in the chariot after murdering her children (289-290). The oriental dress would have enhanced the effect of distancing Medea from the Greek “good” or “normal” woman. “The change in her costume is marked by Jason’s claim, after Medea has appeared in the chariot of the Sun at [ Medea ] 1339-40, that no Greek woman would have dared to do the dreadful thing she did” (291). The zooming and distancing of Medea, the alteration of Medea in oriental dress and Medea in Greek dress allows the exploration of male fears concerning women and deconstructs the oppositional relationship between the “good Greek male self” and the “bad oriental female other” (294-296). In the end, through a series of shifting relationships, Euripides’ Medea allows the more complex perception that “the barbarian is not so different from the self” (296). The final essay in this fine collection offers a look at “Medea as Politician and Diva: Riding the Dragon into the Future.” And indeed, characterizing Medea as a revolutionary symbol, as the exploited other who may fight back, Marianne McDonald not only summarizes some of the other contributors’ main points in the closing essay but also provides a brief summary of the literary history of the various Medea dramatizations taking the reader into the twentieth century and beyond. This essay, which any scholar in comparative literature will appreciate highly, may also stimulate classicists to draw on the rich reception of the Medea theme in their teaching of the myth. McDonald contrasts the 1988 Medea play by Irish playwright Brendan Kennelly with an unpublished opera by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis which was performed in Bilbao, Spain in 1991 and in Athens in 1993. Kennelly deals with questions of imperialism, the exploitation of women by men, Ireland by England, and he shows us a victimized Medea who victoriously fights back. Theodorakis, in contrast, emphasizes the emotional element in Medea over the rational, and “evokes Euripides’ interpretative genius through the symbolic associations of the music” (317). McDonald views Theodorakis’ opera “as another splendid example of how a modern work can elucidate this ancient text” (314). If nothing else, McDonald’s presentation raises a certain curiosity to explore these two and other modern works dealing with the Medea theme. “The twentieth century is especially rich in reworkings of this myth” (297), she claims, and the publication of the most recent Medea novel by German writer Christa Wolf, Medea: Stimmen (Munich: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1996) serves as another good example to support her argument. “Both Kennelly and Theodorakis,” McDonald concludes this remarkable collection of essays, “bring Euripides into modern times and into modern nations. In their own ways, they are true to Euripides and aim at the heart” (323).

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Medea’s monologue to the Chorus illustrates the injustices that befell women of that current system:

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Medea — Medea’s Emotions and the Way She Expresses Them

Medea's Emotions and The Way She Expresses Them

• Categories: Medea

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Words: 1762 |

Published: Jun 29, 2018

Words: 1762 | Pages: 4 | 9 min read

Works Cited:

• Barlow, Shirley A. “Stereotype and Reversal in Euripides' 'Medea'.” Greece & Rome , vol. 36, no. 2, 1989, pp. 158–171.
• Gainor, J. Ellen, Garner Jr., Stanton, Martin Puchner. The Norton Anthology of Drama: Second Edition. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014, pp. 135-174.

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The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids

It’s a need that government subsidies and better family policy can’t necessarily address.

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

The facts of the so-called fertility crisis are well publicized: Birth rates in the United States have been trending down for nearly two decades, and other wealthy countries are experiencing the same. Among those proposing solutions to reverse the trend, the conventional wisdom goes that if only the government were to offer more financial support to parents, birth rates would start ticking up again.

But what if that wisdom is wrong?

In 1960, American women had, on average, 3.6 children; in 2023, the total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman expects to have in her lifetime) was 1.62 , the lowest on record and well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Meanwhile, rates of childlessness are rising: In 2018, more than one in seven women aged 40 to 44 had no biological children, compared with one in 10 in 1976. And according to a new report from Pew Research Center , the share of American adults younger than 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have children rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, to 47 percent. In mainstream American discourse, explanations for these trends tend to focus on economic constraints: People are deciding not to have kids because of the high cost of child care, a lack of parental leave, and the wage penalty mothers face. Some policy makers (and concerned citizens) suggest that expensive government interventions could help change people’s minds.

But data from other parts of the world, including countries with generous family policies, suggest otherwise. Today, every OECD country except Israel has a below-replacement fertility rate, and the speed of the decline during the past decade has outpaced demographers’ expectations. In 2022, the average fertility rate of European Union countries was 1.46 ; in 2023, South Korea’s was 0.72 , the lowest in the world.

South Korea has spent more than $200 billion over the past 16 years on policies meant to boost fertility, including monthly stipends for parents, expanded parental leave, and subsidized prenatal care—yet its total fertility rate fell by 25 percent in that time. France spends a higher percentage of its GDP on family than any other OECD member country, but last year saw its lowest number of births since World War II . Even the Nordic countries , with their long-established welfare states, child-care guarantees, and policies of extended parental leave, are experiencing sharp fertility declines.

Policy shifts that make life easier and less expensive for parents are worthwhile in their own right. But so far, such improvements haven’t changed most countries’ low-fertility rates. This suggests the existence of another, under-discussed reason people aren’t having kids—one that, I have come to believe, has little to do with policy and everything to do with a deep but unquantifiable human need.

Read: To have or not have children

That need is for meaning . In trying to solve the fertility puzzle, thinkers have cited people’s concerns over finances, climate change, political instability, or even potential war. But in listening closely to people’s stories, I’ve detected a broader thread of uncertainty—about the value of life and a reason for being. Many in the current generation of young adults don’t seem totally convinced of their own purpose or the purpose of humanity at large, let alone that of a child. It may be that for many people, absent a clear sense of meaning, the perceived challenges of having children outweigh any subsidy the government might offer.

In his 1960s work on the economics of the family, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker theorized that household decisions, including fertility choices, could be analyzed through an economic lens. More specifically, children could be analogized to goods, like a house or a car; the number that parents had was related to what they could afford in terms of time and money. By this logic, making the goods less expensive—expanding household budgets via subsidies, return-to-career guarantees, and other financial carrots—should be enough to push parents to have more kids.

Governments have generally hewed to this assumption when launching pronatal policies. But two new books exploring why people do or don’t have children—works that take wildly different approaches to the question—suggest that this method is flawed.

Read: Would you have a baby if you won the lottery?

In Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth , Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, an economist and a Catholic mother of eight, compiles interviews with 55 women from across the United States who have five or more children—hers is a qualitative study of Americans happily breaking from the low-birth-rate norm. Connecting the author and her unusual subjects (only about 5 percent of U.S. mothers have five or more kids) is a shared certainty that children are an unqualified good, and that raising them is an activity freighted with positive meaning.

Then there are those who are much less sure. In What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice , Anastasia Berg, an academic and editor at The Point , and Rachel Wiseman, an editor at the same magazine, engage literature, philosophy, and anti-natalist texts to wrestle with whether children are worth having at all. The decision is described as “paralyzing” and “anxiety-provoking,” to be approached with trepidation (even though the authors find individual clarity by the end). But their book echoes Pakaluk’s in one striking respect: Both works share the view that current political strategies for encouraging people to have children are lacking a crucial element. “As attractive as economics may be as a solution to the riddle of the growing ambivalence about having children, it is partial at best,” Berg and Wiseman write. Pakaluk observes, “Cash incentives and tax relief won’t persuade people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, and for their future children.” In other words, no amount of money or social support will inspire people to have children—not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense.

In many quarters, that sort of certainty has become elusive. Indeed, Berg and Wiseman dwell on its opposite: anxiety about whether having children is good or whether it’s an imposition, a decision that might deprive a person of individual fulfillment or even make the world worse in the long run—by, for instance, contributing to climate change, overpopulation, or the continuation of regressive gender norms. “Becoming a parent,” they write, “can seem less like a transition and more like throwing yourself off a cliff.”

The authors touch on the standard narratives of why young people are delaying or forgoing children—financial anxiety, difficulty finding a partner, worries that having kids will be incompatible with their career—but these they describe as “externals,” borrowing a term from the family therapist and author Ann Davidman, not the core concern. One of their interviewees notes that if money were no object, she would be “at least neutral” on the subject of having a child, which is still some distance from positive. Instead, more existential worries emerge, pointing to a loss of stabilizing self-confidence among recent generations, or to the lack of an overarching framework (religious or otherwise) that might help guide people toward a “good” life. “The old frameworks, whatever they were, no longer seem to apply,” Berg and Wiseman write. “And the new ones provide us with hardly any answers at all.”

Read: The two ways to raise a country’s birth rate

The mothers whom Pakaluk profiles approach childbearing with far less ambiguity. As one told her, “I just have to trust that there’s a purpose to all of it.” Her interviewees’ lives are scaffolded by a sincere belief in providence, in which their religious faith often plays a major role. These mothers have confidence that their children can thrive without the finest things in life, that family members can help sustain one another, and that financial and other strains can be trusted to work themselves out. And although the obvious concerns are present—women describe worries about preserving their physical health, professional standing, and identity—they aren’t determinative. Ann, a mother of six, tells Pakaluk that she doesn’t feel “obliged” to have a large family but that she sees “additional children as a greater blessing than travel, than career … I hope we still get to do some of those things, but I think this is more important. Or a greater good.”

It’s a deceptively simple claim—and reinforces the notion that if people are going to have children, they need more than a hunch that human life is valuable. “It is not just the possibility of goodness but its actuality that fuels our deepest longing to ensure a human future,” Berg and Wiseman propose. And yet, we live in a time when even those who are certain about having kids are sometimes treated with skepticism. To proclaim that parenthood could be a positive experience is, in some circles, slightly gauche . “To assert the goodness of one’s own life,” the authors write, “is to risk coming across as privileged, or just hopelessly naive.”

Contrast that with the attitude of Hannah, a mother of seven who tells Pakaluk that each new child “brings benefit to the family and to the world.” She and the other mothers exemplify what happens when meaning is deeply internalized: Many children tend to result—and, according to these women, bring joy with them.

Of course, joy is a hard thing for any policy to promise. Government agencies rely on stats—income, years, “productivity”—to make the case for interventions, and tend to overlook the unmeasurable. Intangible incentives such as purpose, belonging, and love don’t always seem rational. As Robert F. Kennedy put it in a 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, delivered less than three months before he was assassinated: “The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play … It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Kennedy was, essentially, urging Americans to pursue meaning, suggesting that only by doing so would they have the fortitude to fight despair. But “meaning” is not something governments can easily provide; it tends to stem from uniting in the face of undesirable crises (wars, pandemics) or from the sorts of broadly enforced norms (religious, cultural) that many no longer share. (This could be a clue as to why Israel has bucked the low-birth-rate trend: The religious edict to “be fruitful and multiply” is an accepted part of the national culture, and childbearing is viewed as a contribution to a collective goal.)

Politically, there’s very little upside—and often significant downside—in pointing to abstractions without easy solutions. If falling birth rates can be attributed to a loss of meaning, the question then becomes if there can be any government-based solution to fertility decline. People debating whether to have children seem to be seeking certainty that life is a good thing, that more life would thus be better, and that assistance, if needed, will arrive. Government policy can help with the last part. The first two assurances will most likely come only from another source.

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Call for papers for the fifth Global Arts Symposium at Ohio University

The College of Fine Arts and partnering departments across Ohio University invite creative researchers, teachers and practitioners in the arts to address the theme of “Intersections: Arts and Health,” as part of the fifth Global Arts Symposium to be held April 2-3 at Ohio University.

This year’s keynote speaker is Dr. Marisol Norris, founder and CEO of the Black Music Therapy Network, Inc., and director of the Music Therapy and Counseling Master’s Program at Drexel University. She is a leading scholar-activist in music therapy whose work centers on musical placemaking within Black communities. Dr. Norris teaches internationally on the human need for wholeness and the liberatory function of artistic processes to deepen the capacity for relational experience. Her work has been featured in media outlets, including Rolling Stone and Vogue, and has contributed to the international discourse of applied music-based research through platforms such as The Sound Health Network.

Past years keynote lectures have featured seminal composer, Dr. Mark Phillips in 2023, Ben Dotsei Malor in 2022 and Dr. Kofi Agawu in 2024. The fifth Global Arts Festival Symposium will explore the intersections of art and health. This Symposium brings together artists, educators, healthcare professionals, policymakers and researchers to share innovative approaches and cutting-edge research. The Symposium is not just a gathering; it's a catalyst for change. It's a platform to discover how the arts transform healthcare and how healthcare informs it. Join us to ignite creativity, foster collaboration, and reimagine the future of arts and health. We anticipate an audience of approximately 500-700 attendees.

We are eagerly awaiting proposals, that cover the following areas: Arts in Healthcare (performing, literary, visual arts, and design); Role of Arts in Community Development; Arts in Traditional, Complementary, and Alternative Healing Practices; Performing Arts Medicine; Arts and Wellness; Arts and Mental Health; Human-centered Design; Creative Arts Therapies; Arts and Public Health; Medical Humanities; Arts in Community Health; Arts and Medicine; Arts and Self-care; Arts and Psychology; Interdisciplinary Arts and Health; Artistic Interventions for Children; Artistic Interventions after COVID-19 and other Global Pandemics; among other ideas.

Your ideas and contributions are what make this Symposium truly special. We welcome a variety of formats including individual papers, roundtables, workshops, panels, posters, performances, films and other research and creative activity forms.

The symposium is accepting submissions on a rolling basis through Dec. 15, 2024. Find the full  Call for Papers details and submit online. Early submissions are highly encouraged.

Those with questions can contact Festival and Symposium Director, Prof. Paschal Younge at  [email protected] .