Category: CLOSED-Plot

I have compiled the previous lists of the plot with my own and made a master list.  If anyone would like to add or change it please feel free.

I agree with the decision of the inciting incident being Creon’s offer of Glauce to Jason.

The Plot of Medea

·        Jason leaves Medea

·        Nurse grieves for Medea's fate. (Beginning Exposition)

·        Nurse worries about Medea's reaction to Jason's decision to marry Creon's daughter.

·        Tutor warns the Nurse that Creon will exile Medea (Complication)

·        Nurse sends  the children inside to hide from Medea and her overwhelming and vocal despair

·        Nurse warns Medea not to overstep her bounds to prevent punishment from the gods.

·        Chorus attempt to soothe Medea's grief.  Chorus warns Medea not to act to severely or rashly.

·        Medea prays to the gods for revenge for the unfaithfulness of her husband.

·        Medea addresses the chorus and request that they not reveal her plan.  Chorus agrees that Jason deserves punishment for his actions.

·        Creon banishes Medea and her sons.

·        Chorus agrees with and understands Medea's anger.

·        Medea manipulates Creon into letting her and the children stay for one more day.

·        Medea decides on the plan to poison everyone.  She calls on the goddess of black magic to assist her.

·        Chorus supports Medea and her decision.

·        Medea argues with Jason. Medea accuses him of being an unfaithful liar, and he berates Medea for not understanding. (Complication)

·        Jason offers Medea financial support during his families exile.  She refuses.

·        Chorus curses Jason that he will die unloved and friendless.  Chorus preaches of the burden and suffering that comes along with love.

·        Aegeus pledges to house Medea and her children in Athens in exchange for Medea's magic.

·        Medea solidifies her plan of murders.

·        Medea sends the Nurse to bring Jason.

·        Chorus disagrees with Medea's plans and they mourn the unevitable deaths to come.

·        Medea trick Jason into trusting her and letting the children stay.

·        Medea sends the children to Glauce with the elaborate, poisoned gifts.

·        Creon and Glauce die from the poison.

·        Chorus condems Medea's actions, but accuses everyone of being in the wrong.

·        Chorus begs Helios (the sun-god) to stop Medea from killing her children.  Chorus speaks of the burden of having children and the pain they cause.

·        Messenger enters and warns Medea to flee as they have identified her as the cause of Creon and Glauce's death.

·        Medea says goodbye to her sons as she must leave.

·        Medea kills her sons (climax).

·        Jason discovers his dead sons. (recognition).

·        Jason mours the death of his sons.  He wants to bury them.  (reversal).

·        Medea does not let him and flies away in the chariot of Helios with the bodies of her dead children.

·        Jason exits to bury Creon and his new wife. (new stasis).

·        Chorus ends the play by stating that the Gods act in mysterious ways.

Medea adheres to the unities of Greek drama and therefore has an intensive plot.  Every complication leads to a heightening of Medea’s intense emotion; every retaliation as a result of that emotion has devastating effects on others.  The main idea of the play, however, is the cause and effect which takes place as a result of Jason’s thirst for fame.  He is not grateful for what he has and grasps for things beyond his means.  Consequently, Jason is punished for his hubris by losing everything he originally had.

Inciting incident-  I agree that the inciting incident is definitely when Jason leaves Medea.  Not that Creon's offer didn't cause him to leave, but as Glen said, he had a choice.  This specific choice set the play we read into action.  Had the offer been the inciting incident, we would have a play about Jason's choices.  The stasis disrupted would have been Jason's view of his home, not the home that he leaves.  Beginning Exposition-  People generally have this covered.  Medea and Jason met when Jason sailed to find the Golden Fleece.  She helped him get it, and they fell in love.  However, they were exiled and came to live in Corinth, where they were accepted as equals of the people in the city and gained their place.  Creon is the ruler of Corinth and has a daughter, Glauce, whose hand in marriage was just offered to Jason by Creon.  Jason accepts this offer, beginning the story.  Also:  Medea is sneaky, possibly magical, and has two sons by Jason.  She is a descendent of the Sun God (Apollo/Hyperion), and this could possibly be Euripides' way of telling the audience not to mess with the Gods. Complications-  The goal of the central character (Medea) is to have her revenge on Jason for breaking his marriage oath to her.  The first and most obvious problem is tha Medea doesn't have much time to extract her revenge.  Though she is given one day, she has a very short period of time to do what she intends to do.  This is a climactic play, implied by the amount of time elapsing.  Another point of stress comes from Medea's safety as she is carrying out her plan and afterwards as well.  This complication is Aolved by Aegeus' promise of asylum in Athens in exchange for her "powers."  I'm not sure about other complications, maybe her children are a complication to her plan but it seems like they are simply another accessory to her plot.  Plus, if they are a complication she gets rid of said complication pretty easily. Crisis-  Not a lot to say, the person who did crisis covered what's going on.  The physical action that one would call the crisis is the poisoning of Glauce, which causes her and her father's deaths.  This leads to her full destruction of Jason's life. Climax/Reversal-  Again, already been said by others, but the climax is the realization of Medea's revenge.  She murders her children, his children, and thereby ends his legacy.  She emasculates Jason, here, by destroying his lineage, his blood line.  It seems that for most of the time before the play began Jason was always taking from Medea, but now the roles have reversed and she is the one taking from Jason.  The position of power has reversed.  Resolution-  So we have a newfound stasis in the play.  Jason loses his childen, fiancé and soon to be father in law, while Medea ascends into the heavens with the bodies of her children.  DO NOT mess with the Gods.

While crisis and climax seem similar enough to be mistaken for each other, Medea‘s crisis and climax are two separate events which work together to create the highest tension of the play.  The crisis is the death of Glauce and Creon.  In one short event, both Jason’s fiance and his future father-in-law are dead.  With them go his hopes of fame and fortune for himself and his sons.  Already devastated by this, Jason is set up for the final blow of the climax.  Medea, who has already destroyed Jason’s hopes for upward mobility, goes on to kill their children.

The reversal that occurs with these actions is an act of total revenge on Jason.  First, he loses those who would help him move up in the world; next, he loses his entire reason for leaving Medea in the first place.  He now has nothing and no one except Medea, which is the position in which Medea found herself at the beginning of the play.  Their roles have been switched, and now Jason is at her mercy.   Jason demands the bodies of his sons, much as Medea begged to keep them when she discovered that she had been exiled.  Just as Jason denied her requests, Medea now rejects his.  In an ironic parody of Jason’s thirst for upward mobility, Medea ascends to the skies in Apollo’s chariot, taking her sons’ bodies with her.  Jason is left at the end with no family, having caused their deaths, feeling much as Medea did when she left her grieving father in Colchis.

As I was detailing the actions of  Medea, I focused on the goal of describing events that could be put into active verbs which force another character into doing something, as we discussed in class.  After reading Glenn’s post, I feel that I may have oversimplified some of the action of the play, but I also agree that our ways of detailing the action are equally important.  Hopefully this list will be comparable to hers, and we will find some way to combine them into one thorough plot analysis.

My list is as follows:

1) Jason leaves Medea.

2) Creon banishes Medea.

3) Chorus endorses (accepts, agrees with?) Medea’s anger.

4) Medea begs Creon for one more day in Corinth.

5) Jason berates Medea for retaliating/not understanding his plan.

6) Medea rejects Jason’s offer of security.

7) Medea offers her skills in magic in return for refuge with Aegeus.

8) Chorus challenges Medea’s plan.

9) Medea sends her sons to Glauce with gifts.

10)  Chorus condemns Medea’s actions.

11) Medea says goodbye to her sons.

12) Chorus condemns having children for the pain that they cause.

13) Creon and Glauce die.

Frankly, I’m not really sure if I did this correctly – that is, if I actually got down the plot instead of the story.  Ideas?

Also, I’m not sure why there is a bespectacled smiley face instead of an eight…I can’t seem to fix it.

I’m going to keep working on these, but this is what I have so far… List of Actions

•  Nurse grieves for Medea’s fate.
•  Nurse foresees/ worries about Medea’s reaction to Jason’s wedding.
•  Tutor warns Nurse that Creon is going to exile Medea.
• Nurse sends children inside to hide from Medea.
• Nurse warns that overstepping your bounds/ having too much will get you punished by the gods.
• Chorus attempt to sooth Medea’s grief.
• Medea prays to/ demands that the gods revenge her.
• Medea petitions the Chorus not to reveal her plan, Chorus agrees. 
• Creon exile’s Medea and her children
• Medea tricks Creon into letting her and the children stay one more day.
• Medea plans/ convinces herself to poison Creon’s daughter and Jason.
• Chorus supports Medea and her decision.
• Jason offers Medea financial support while she and the children are exiled. 
• Medea accuses Jason of being an unfaithful liar. 
• Jason defends himself against Medea’s accusations.
• Chorus curses Jason that he will die unloved and friendless. 
• Aegeus pledges to house Medea and children during exile.
• Medea formulates/ solidifies her plan to kill Creon’s daughter and her children.
• Medea sends the Nurse to bring Jason.
• Chorus disagrees with Medea/ reveals drawbacks to plan.
• Medea tricks Jason into letting the children stay
• Medea sends the children to Creon’s daughter with the poison presents.
• Chorus accuses everyone (Jason, Creon’s daughter, Medea) of being wrong.
• Medea debates, and then strengthens her resolve to kill her children.
• Messenger enters and warns Medea to flee (crisis). 
• Chorus begs Helios (sun-god) to stop Medea from killing her children (his great-grandchildren).
• Medea kills her sons (climax). 
• Jason discovers his dead sons (recognition).
• Jason mourns his sons/wants to bury them (reversal). 
• Medea flies away in the chariot with the bodies of her dead children.
• Jason exits to bury Creon and his daughter (new stasis). 

The stasis of Medea’s world before Euripides’ play is indeed precarious.  Having fallen in love with Jason, Medea helps him to win the Golden Fleece against her father’s wishes, then kills her brother.  She leaves Colchis and, in turn, loses everything she has ever known.  Jason and Medea sail to Corinth, where she is essentially looked upon as a lower-class barbarian.  This is compounded with her nature as an argumentative, vengeful woman with knowledge of magic.   Living in an alien land where she is seen as a savage witch, her husband is her greatest support.  In Medea’s time and place, that is a dangerous position for a woman indeed.

The inciting incident which tips all of these factors out of balance is Creon’s offering of Glauce to Jason.  At first glance, it seems that it could be Jason’s actual announcement that he is leaving Medea.  However, it is obvious that Jason highly prizes his social and political position. There is no way that he would refuse Creon’s offer of a young, beautiful bride who can bring him prestige. On the other hand, Jason is very aware of Medea’s nature and her magical abilities. He knows that she will react violently. Therefore, there is no other outcome that could occur from Creon’s offer.