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Euripides and Chopin, in their respective works Medea and The Awakening, present main characters who, because of their roles as females (and as a foreigner in Medea’s case), are expected by society to fill certain positions. Medea and Edna both eventually eschew the confined rigors of their societies, and they shun traditional gender roles. Each goes to drastic lengths to remedy her seemingly dire situation, and each does things thought by society to be achievable only at the hands of men. Jason personally betrays Medea, a woman who left her homeland, killed her own kin, and bore and mothered boys for the callous Greek. In Medea’s time, especially in Greece, women were expected to be solely maternal figures capable of little strength or rational cerebration; they were basically passive, reactive servants to their husbands. Common perception of women was that they were, as Aristotle put it, no better than slaves. Through Euripides’s play, however, Medea proves to be the purest antithesis of these qualities. She does not accept Jason’s actions submissively; she resolves to exact revenge. Grecian society isolates Medea for two simple reasons: she is a woman exhibiting stereotypical male qualities, and she is not a Greek