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MEDEA'S SOL-IPSISM: LANGUAGE, POWER AND IDENTITY IN SENECA'S MEDEA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 August 2019
Extract
Recent investigations of Seneca's Medea have found consistently fascinating the way in which Medea progressively flags her realization of enacted identity and selfhood. She self-consciously pierces the fabric of her drama with identifying declarations, colored by especial reference to her name: the announcement Medea superest (‘Medea remains’, 166) and bald statement of fiam (‘I will be’, 171) in response to hearing her own name lead to the supreme utterance of Medea nunc sum (‘now I am Medea’, 910). Medea conjures herself into being with these three identifications, stepping fully into the troubling contours she knows of not only her own mythology, but also her literary history. Medea's dominating focus on her name allows this layered acknowledgement of self, of Medea as both mythological figure and literary fixture. In resultant discussions, the weight given to her name in precipitating this sense of identity within her play has, quite naturally, led to a proportionate emphasis upon who Medea is. In some ways, Medea's notably self-annotative process of becoming ‘Medea’ eclipses other useful interrogative frameworks of her identity: the spotlight on the ‘who’ of Medea comes somewhat at the expense of the ‘what’, or the ‘how’. This is not to say that such categories are not mutually informative or intertwined, for Medea (by Seneca's time) does, in fact, have a defining act: the murder of her children. Who Medea is stems from what she does, the sentiment vividly expressed by Medea nunc sum. In light of these considerations, I would suggest a different perspective from which to conceptualize Medea's identity, one that takes into account the paired aspects of being and doing that together comprise an understanding of character, especially within drama. This perspective departs from a framework dependent on progressive structural characterization, as represented by the trio of passages cited above, and focuses instead on characterization via demonstrated patterns of linguistic tendency, on both macroscopic and microscopic levels. From the beginning, Medea displays measured consistency with her relentless knowledge of self as she transforms these categories of identification and action: as the play develops, her sense of ‘this is who I am’ becomes ‘this is what I do’.
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