Playing the Victim in Euripides’ Medea

Abstract

This article argues that in Euripides’ Medea, suffering functions not as an inner emotional state but as a performative and rhetorical resource. By tracing Medea’s repeated deployment of the language of suffering, it shows how she claims and monopolizes victimhood to control the play’s moral economy. Building on Levett’s account of verbal self-restraint and Zerba’s conception of Medea as hypokrites, the article contends that Medea does not simply manipulate language strategically but actively performs victimhood as a theatrical role. Euripides thereby exposes tragedy’s dependence on staged, persuasive suffering.