DÉUS EX MÁCHINA: IMMORTALITY CLOSE AT HAND. ELIZABETH BÁTHORY IN POSTHUMANISM
DÉUS EX MÁCHINA: IMMORTALITY CLOSE AT HAND. ELIZABETH BÁTHORY IN POSTHUMANISM

Summary/Abstract: The ghosts of immortality come to life in posthumanism: the future is today, and the extinction of death is no longer just a theme of a science-fiction of whose qualities we may doubt. When the term “transhumanism” appeared, the idea that nothing is impossible emerged, the fact that the individual can overcome the boundaries of the biological, by modifying the cognitive and genetic structures, and that eternity is something at hand. Writers have found tempting this myth, the transcendence of ontological-existential boundaries, they have flown over it with passion throughout times and have offered a whole plethora of characters in their search of abolishing the time. In the 3rd millennium, Elizabeth Bathory, also called “Lady Dracula” or the “bloody countess”, follows the path of metamorphosis into one of the most famous Gothic images in the world. It is indeed a real mixture of fables, fears and real historical facts in the genesis of this character, who now is at the edge of reaching its final profile, known and acknowledged. Her biography seems hard to be written in the absence of the legend, so it becomes difficult to distinguish between truth and mystification. Obviously, her genesis, was marked by the stories woven around her, in a certain historical context, by the collective imagination, attracted and fascinated by vampires, witches, reincarnation, sadism and sexuality. The novel “The Bloody Countess” written by Andrei Codrescu creates the scene of a theatre of evil, but beyond the sensational, paints a character similar to the historical figure and being at the same time, a fresco of Europe marked by the cruelty in which the countess lived. Thanks to the power of the word and image, Bathory started his expansion into the realm of the public’s imagination, by capturing it and becoming overwhelming. Therefore, literature found what alchemists were looking for: Mysterium Tremendum, the suspension of time to preserve the eternal youth.

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