MEDEA AND INFANTICIDE: EURIPIDES, SENECA, AND CORNEILLE (GREECE, ITALY (ROMAN), FRANCE).
Item
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Title
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MEDEA AND INFANTICIDE: EURIPIDES, SENECA, AND CORNEILLE (GREECE, ITALY (ROMAN), FRANCE).
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Identifier
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AAI8501126
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identifier
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8501126
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Creator
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CORTI, LILLIAN.
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Contributor
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LillianFeder
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Date
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1984
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, Romance | Literature, Classical
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Abstract
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Although the tragic character, Medea, is notorious for killing her children, and Aristotle describes tragedy as an imitation of an action, the theme of infanticide has not figured prominently in critical discussion of literary Medeas. Considerations of comparatively recent findings in the fields of medicine, psychology, anthropology, and history, however, suggest that infanticidal impulses and acts are germane to human nature; consideration of the most essential aspects of the traditional characterization of Medea suggests that Medea is a projection of commonly experienced emotions which are ordinarily repressed. But tragedy originated in communal ceremonies, and the meaning of a great tragedy is not likely to be confined within the terms of personal psychology. Hostility to children is not only typical of particular minds, but corresponds to a general awareness of the threat which uncontrolled generativity poses to human survival. One of many discernible indications that such awareness precedes the articulation of demographic calculations by several millenia inheres in the curious recurrence of themes of infanticide, war, witchcraft, and mass migration in ancient myths as well as in modern essays on population dynamics. The grim tragedy of Medea encompasses the psychology of abusive parents as well as the confrontation of humanity with the burden of its progeny because of the inseparability of personal psychology and social possibility. Euripides employs the theme of infanticide in an exploration of the destructive potential of traditional values, and Seneca depicts the child-murderer as the insanely violent specter of imperial tyranny; Corneille's Medee embodies the ruthless response of absolutism to the internecine rivalries of a bustling early modern society. But all three great poets chose to dramatize the myth of Medea in periods when the "sacrifice" of children for the sake of various "causes" was a familiar social reality. The object of my study is to demonstrate that personal and communal imperatives to murder children not only reinforce each other in tragic versions of the myth of Medea, they tend to reflect the dreadful exigencies of the worlds in which their creators operate.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Comparative Literature
