Medea nunc sum: Staging, Ekphrasis, and Identity in Seneca's Medea

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the use of vivid descriptive language in Seneca’s tragedy Medea, with an emphasis on the fourth act of the play. I argue that the nurse’s speech in this act functions as an ekphrasis, a term commonly used to refer to the verbal description of visual art. The nurse’s ekphrasis emphasizes Medea’s magical prowess and her alarming refusal to conform to social norms, and the following speech delivered by Medea herself responds to the nurse’s ekphrasis and overturns its stylistic conventions. This “ekphrastic collapse,” I argue, occurs when Medea’s magical performance—the visual art component of the ekphrasis—coexists onstage with her own verbal description of her work. In order to fully examine the “ekphrastic collapse” of Medea’s monologue, I engage with the current scholarly debate over the intended medium of Senecan tragedy, and ultimately argue that Seneca’s plays were intended for the stage, not for a reading or recitation. It is on the stage that Medea must kill her children in order for the fifth act of Seneca’s play to maintain the dramatic momentum of the first four acts, and it is on the stage that Medea delivers the ekphrasis of her own performative ritual act. The collapse of ekphrastic convention that results from Medea’s assumption of the dual roles of art object and narrator allows her to realize her own mythical and dramatic potential as a violator of societal and literary boundaries.