Loose Notes on Stoicism, Interiority, and Epistemological Crisis in Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam

Seminar paper from the year 2001 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing , language: English, abstract: As the title indicates, this paper presents a rather loose collection, or perhaps a montage of observations I made while closely reading and thinking about Cary’s famous closet drama. These observations concern, among other things, the heroine’s self-fashioning as a Stoic subject; the resulting problems of continual identity, interiority, and subjection; the linguistic dimension of Herod’s madness, which I (owing much of my outlook on things to Foucault) read as an instance of escalating epistemological crisis.