ATAR Notes: Forum
VCE Stuff => VCE English Studies => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE English & EAL => Topic started by: rnrn on October 25, 2017, 10:51:13 pm
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This one has been sitting in my head for a few days now, and I just can not come up with an answer to it! >:(
The prompt is: 'No character in Medea get what they deserve." Discuss.
There's just so many factors at play here, and you have to answer other existential yet pertinent questions like: who are the victims? Who is responsible for the characters' fates? Ughhh. This is doing my head in - anyone got any ideas or suggestions?
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wassup rnrn
You can basically highlight 2 words form this prompt, "no" to signify that it is an absolute statement, and your job is to conform+challenge it, "deserve" can mean 2 things tho, reward? and punishment. And are you getting more than what you deserve? or less than that?
Also generally avoid dividing your paragraphs into single character paragraphs, a lot of their characteristics overlap, and you can talk about them in the same paragraph.
For this prompt, I would divide it into 4:
- The punishments of people who have committed immoral acts exceed their crime (common feature within Greek tragedies)
You can talk about Jason, and Creon here.
- Those who are presumed to be innocent (in this play at least), do not get the treatment they deserve as well.
Children, Glauce (these are obvious ones), and Aegeus (you might want to consider this character, because it is worth questioning whether he deserves a "child killer" "whose presence is pollution" in his city state or not? The Chorus mentioned this once in the play).
- Those who do not play a role in altering the plot of the play, are also affected by the emotional purgation when Medea commits filicide/when Jason betrays Medea.
Nurse, Tutor, Chorus. Do they deserve to be a part of this tragedy? There isn't much to write about this one, but talk about the psychological impact. Eg: having to see Medea contemplate death, plot her infamous killings, and their comments on the issue here.
- Medea (I'm separating this as a single paragraph, which kinda contradicts the statement above whoops) who resolves the play in the form of a cascade of tragic events did not receive any punishments she truly deserved. (debatable, because she "suffers twice as much" for her murders)
She receives assistance from the Sun God, stuff like that, yeah. I would focus on the deus ex machina here.
PS: if you're stuck on a question, just think of a simplistic answer to it! (people get confused when they overthink hahaha), good luck :)
Edit: ahhh the constant things I forgot to add. You can talk about emotional purgation as a form of catharsis as well (point no. 2), common feature within Greek tragedies, which just means emotional cleansing (here's Aristotle's definition to replace my crappy explanations: Catharsis: a tragedy first raises the emotions of pity and fear, then purges them. Whether Aristotle means to say that this takes place only within the action of the play, or whether he thinks that the audience also undergoes a cathartic experience, is still hotly debated. )