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SUMMARY:Reproducing Rome: Motherhood in Senecan drama (Medea and Phaedra)'
 . - Dr. Mairead Mcauley-Dept of Classics\, University of KwaZulu-Natal\, D
 urban\, SA.
DTSTART:20090205T130000Z
DTEND:20090205T140000Z
UID:TALK16747@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Lesley Dixon
DESCRIPTION:\n‘Bad’ mothers are rife in the tragedies of the Roman\nph
 ilosopher-dramatist Seneca (1st c. AD)\, circulating with demonic\nenergy 
 through almost all of his plays. Victims or victimisers\, often\nboth\, ch
 aracters such as Jocasta\, Medea\, Phaedra\, Juno or Clytemnestra\,\nall e
 mbody a transgressive femininity that becomes\, in Seneca’s hands\,\nine
 xtricably linked with their identities as mothers or stepmothers.\nFocusin
 g on Medea and Phaedra\, Seneca’s two most tormented\, yet also\nmost fa
 scinating\, feminine figures\, in this paper I ask: why this\nintense conc
 ern in the tragedies with nightmarish manifestations of\nmaternal vice? Re
 cent criticism has adopted a philosophical or\npsychological approach to S
 eneca’s characters\, reading Medea and Phaedra\nas studies in Stoic doct
 rine on the passions. Yet this tends to occlude\nthe politics of gender re
 presentation in both plays: in the concern to\nshow\, for example\, that M
 edea is a negative exemplar of the ideal Stoic\nsage (by default\, male)\,
  it hardly seems to matter that Medea is also a woman\, and that her crime
  – that of a mother killing her children – is profoundly gendered on c
 ultural and ethical grounds. On the one hand\, these tormented women are p
 resented as monstrous\, amoral and vulnerable to passions at the expense o
 f reason\, but on the other\, I argue\, they are carefully positioned with
 in a shared societal moral discourse on gender\, marriage and parenthood i
 n imperial Rome\, thus inching their‘monstrous\,’ ‘unnatural’ acts
  unnervingly closer to a contemporary familial and institutional norm. I s
 uggest that\, in showing the ‘mother’s part’ as she struggles with h
 er tragic dilemma and the persona she must inhabit\, these plays channel a
 nd distort larger concerns in this period about political agency\, forms o
 f legitimacy and paternal power.
LOCATION:Hardy Building (Downing Site) Room 101
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