Bongiovanni, Sofia; (2024) Aspects of outrageous violence in Seneca’s letters and tragedies. A comparative analysis of the author’s use of extreme and violent death scenes. Masters thesis (M.Phil), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis conducts a comparative study of violent death scenes in Seneca’s epistles and tragedies, with the aim of analysing the function and depiction of violence across Seneca’s prose and poetry works. This study reads the imagery and violent themes in both the epistles and the tragedies, not through a one-dimensional Stoic interpretation, but through a multi-faceted thematic, literary, and theoretical analysis of the presentation of violence, alongside an examination of Seneca’s Stoic ideas. Previous studies have interpreted the marked use of violent imagery in Seneca’s writings from either a Stoic or an anti-Stoic point of view, while more recently scholars have applied psychoanalytical and literary theory to Seneca’s tragedies in particular. Following the trend in recent scholarship of reading Seneca’s body of work whole, this thesis brings a literary lens to both corpora to explore the Senecan obsession with the exposure of the body to both tragic and philosophical violence and its subsequent display. This thesis argues that violence in these texts is presented by Seneca as a spectacle of power to provoke a reaction from the audience, and this reaction is described as ranging from extreme disgust to utter pleasure. To support my argument, I draw upon a range of theoretical and anthropological approaches, in particular Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Maurizio Bettini’s theory of Roman biologie sauvage. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach on abjection resonates powerfully with Seneca’s graphic depictions of suicide. Bettini’s anthropological theory finds correspondence in Seneca’s violent portraits of familial relationships. The thesis examines Seneca’s recurrent theme of self-inflicted violence in the form of suicide as well as the violence imparted by the powerful on those who are subject to them, by looking at key passages from the epistles and tragedies. This multi-pronged approach sheds light on Seneca’s spectacularization of violence within his writings.

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