The Visit Of The Old Lady Analysis

Civilization is a term signifying that mankind reached a high level of development. With the celebration of the advent of the 20th century, the Western societies saw as the winners of the evolutionary arms race. It was not surprising why this notion was easily accepted, people seized the last pieces of the most inaccessible parts of the world and they even started conquering the sky. Culture, technology and science became trademarks for modern society. However, after the First World War followed by economic crisis and the second World War, this modern society had to sober up from these ideas and own arrogance.
The play “The visit of the old lady”, written by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, established a platform for questioning morality, humanity and justice in the modern world. Dürrenmatt decided, for the purpose of the representation this modern society and its values, to write his play different way than it had been maintained through the traditional concept of drama. The play was called, according to Dürrenmatt, as “eine tragische Komödie” (a tragicomedy) and the reason for choosing this form of the genre was to illustrate the

It appears that during this process the society shifted from the traditional to materialistic views. Daviau and Dunkle argued that justice was a relative term, because the whole idea of justice was only artificially created by society. Therefore, the manipulation with the term justice was quite easy. They added that the view of justice in the play could be linked to the concept of justice in the Old Testament, where justice was equalized to revenge. In this sense, Claire Zachanassian’s revenge could be seen as a tool to remove evil from the town. However, it appears that the term justice mostly served as a shield to reasonable the decision by community to kill their fellow