Blood Justice and the Legal Order in the Oresteia and The Secret Agent
| Autor: | Panagopoulos, Nic |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2023 |
| Předmět: | |
| DOI: | 10.26262/clr.v1i0.9352 |
| Popis: | The present essay adopts Jean-Pierre Vernant’s hermeneutic framework about the way ancient tragedy reveals contradictions in 5th century Athens to explore diachronic problems in Western culture such as the relationship of justice to vengeance, as they are presented in the Oresteia and The Secret Agent. Like Aeschylus’s famous trilogy, Conrad’s modern tragedy shows a man being murdered by his wife for having sacrificed their “child” in the course of his campaigns abroad. However, unlike Orestes who after being hounded by the Furies for killing his mother is finally acquitted by the newly founded court in Athens, Winnie is driven mad by the fear of the gallows which are presented as indistinguishable from the blood justice that should have been superseded by humane civic institutions. Thus, Conrad’s primitivist narrative deconstructs the difference between the Pre-Olympian and Post-Olympian worlds, suggesting that social institutions have not progressed in substance as opposed to form. Comparative Literature Review, No 1 (2023) |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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