Medea Journal 3

Medea and Oedipus have extremely different ways of fitting the description of a tragedy.Medea's troubles are caused by the choices she makes, Oedipus' are caused by fate. Medea acts on planned revenge, Oedipus on his impulses. However, the self-induced downfall that these elements combine to lead to make both Medea and Oedipus tragedies.
Medea decides to kill all the people dear to her husband in order to spite him. She has the choice of not killing anyone and suffering in silence, but such is her nature, and the nature of the situation, that it is nearly impossible for her to not get angry and fight back. Because Medea's nature is such, she must make the choice to kill the people dear to her husband, which includes her sons. Medea's inability to see how much her choice harms her induces pity from the audience. The audience sees Medea's unshakeable anger at her husband, and the things that it drives her to do, and pities Medea's rage.
Oedipus' problems occur based on a prophecy. When he was a baby, a prophecy saying that he would kill his dad and marry his mom made his parents try to kill him. Now, Oedipus has come back and fulfilled the prophecy, but upon having realized that, Oedipus feels unbearable pain for the trouble and shame he has brought both upon himself and on his entire family. This agony that Oedipus feels over something that he cannot control evokes pity from the audience. The audience feels empathy for Oedipus' situation, as if they were in such a situation that they couldn't control, and thus pity is evoked.
Medea's tragedy is based on the revenge she plots against Jason. She becomes so obsessed with getting back at him for marrying someone else, she loses all perspective. When she does so, she fails to see that the person she is going to hurt most is herself, because she will have to live her entire life with the burden of having killed her sons. But she does not see that-she only sees the primary thing at hand-destroying her husband. This evokes fear from the audience not only because of Medea's bloodthirstiness, but because it opens up the idea that we could become so obsessed with revenge that we could take rash actions similar to Medea's without realizing what we are truly doing, and then have to live with it all our lives.
Oedipus' tragedy is based on the impulses he follows. Oedipus' reaction to his discovery is one of agony. He can't bear the thought of what he has done, so he screams and gouges his eyes out. He then asks to be banished. While these events are not tragic alone, the fact that Oedipus is sentencing himself to such a life of pain and lonliness evokes fear. We worry, upon reading this, that we could become so impulsive that in a fit of anguish we could do something like this that could be permanently damaging.
Oedipus and Medea have different ways of depicting tragedy, but both evoke fear and pity through the actions of their heroes.