Journal of Humanistic and Social Studies (Nov 2015)
Seneca’s Medea. A Performance of the Macabre
Abstract
From a stoical perspective, the Senecan tragedies are the field on which man confronts his destiny in a battle between ira and furor, on the one hand, and reason on the other. Seneca’s plays focus on extreme circumstances and pathological characters. From a visual, macabre viewpoint, Senecan characters belong to the category of the monstrous. They are actors in a lugubrious performance and should be analysed not based on the criteria of sanity, but those of insanity that goes beyond the limits of a troubled human mind. Seneca creates an astounding aesthetic category of diabolical male and female prototypes. His characters gradually give up their human features and culminate in a terrifying demonic representation for which both the playwright and his audience had a peculiar kind of admiration. The shocking macabre side of Seneca’s tragedies intensifies the act of killing, the symbol of revenge and the concepts of dolor, ira, furor, nefas and fatum with which murder blends naturally and indissolubly and which are embodied in emblematic characters like Medea and Thyestes. The feast of male cruelty follows the fascinating female demonic performance ending with the metamorphosis of the witch. In opposition to the blood that boils in the characters’ mind and soul, sanguis, the blood that will flow too slowly from Seneca’s veins, will become the symbol of death seen not as a tragic end, but moral and spiritual emancipation.
