Medea - Mother or Monster?

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Throughout the film, the audience becomes aware of the similarities consistent in Brenda, Medea, and even Maya. They are outsiders, unable to become one with their surroundings. Maya grew accustomed to her life in Los Angeles, so when she returned to Greece, her homeland, she found herself feeling like a foreigner. Both Medea and Brenda relocated their lives for their husbands, only to be betrayed. They are alone, in unfamiliar territory, and have no support. Medea is left to fend for herself; Brenda is alienated because of language barriers, and Maya lost her closest friend over a boy. An additional piece of information that links the three is that like the others, Maya “killed” her unborn child in a sense. When Maya was a teenager, she opted to have an abortion, as she was too young to carry the child. While her reason behind the action is very different, there is still a level of similarity that serves as a link between the women.

This likeness between Maya and the two women serves as an advantage to Maya as she plays Medea. She begins to understand that sate of mind Medea must have been in, going through the motions of everything but the murder itself. She uses the familiar aspects of Medea’s character in order to portray Medea in a relatable way. Additionally, the parallel between Maya – a real, tangible person - and Medea/Brenda presents the audience with a relatable, human character. We are able to feel the emotions – loneliness, pain, passion, isolation – and what it can do to a person. Such desperation can lead to acts that one could never fathom otherwise.

A Dream of Passion takes Euripides’s word and reinterprets both the play and the character in order to produce a character the audience can understand and even sympathize with. Instead of Medea being some kind of mystical being like in Euripides’s account, the play sheds light on how we can all, in fact, become our own “medeas,” as a result of social norms and male oppression. Dassin juxtaposes Euripides’s traditional unrecognizable and supernatural character with one that the audience can empathize with.

One could argue that Euripides and Dassin use different stories to produce the same meaning. In the former’s account, Medea devises a plan in order to accomplish what she feels is necessary – revenge. Similarly, Maya in A Dream of Passion breaks free from male oppression. She takes Costa’s vision and makes it her own, providing a new narrative. While one may argue that the parallel implies the same meaning between the pieces, Dassin’s account of Medea vastly differs from Euripides’s, producing different meanings.

Dassin’s A Dream of Passion take the same story as Euripides’s Medea, but altars it, thus producing a conflicting ideas of the namesake[b] character. Euripides’s traditional character contains aspects of passion, anger, and mysticism. These aspects can make it difficult for the audience to dig deeper into the character, putting aside the witchcraft, in order to discover greater depth. The tradition Medea is juxtaposed with a more human and understandable woman in Dassin’s account. Dassin shows a much more obviously human Medea than Euripides, which is evident when comparing these works side by side. By removing the layers of magic and witchcraft, the two works are far more comparable. But on a more surface level, it is hard to relate to the Medea Euripides presents over the one Dassin conveys. Though both works draw from the same muthos, they paint Medea in very different ways.

Works Cited

A Dream of Passion. Dir. Jules Dassin. 1978. Film.

Euripides, and Robin Robertson. Medea. London: Vintage Classic, 2009.

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