Student-designed final essay sample a

When I signed up for the course, my parents asked me what was tragedy and I just shrugged my shoulders.  I wasn't real interested in conjuring up a definition for my parents.  Tragedy did not seem so foreign to me.  Personally I was struggling to see my life as anything but a sad, hopeless story.  My understanding of tragedy parallels with the growth of my understanding of myself.
     Before I began this class, genre was a generalized term I threw around to describe a simple classification of books, movies and music.  I was a little skeptical beginning to study genre.  The purpose was unclear.  What was I to learn from defining genres?  I thought genre was just to help organize pieces of work in some way in anthologies and libraries.  But what I didn't realize was that genre helps to analyze the text. Especially tragedy, which is so hard to define. I do not see this classification as limiting at all.  What causes me to delve deeper into these tragic dramas that we studied was that there must be something more to them.  The fact that Oedipus Rex can withstand time and still be a powerful text means there must be a power or intangible quality that can not be described within a tragedy.  Knowing the patterns helped me to get past the actions of the characters and try to experience the characters more wholly.  Instead of genre causing me "to take one work less seriously than another" it actually heightened my awareness of repeating factors. (BM 04) 
     In this half of the semester I connected more with the characters.  As I saw the characters develop, I was beginning to understand my emotions better. I was not associating well with the female characters of Hamlet and Oedipus Rex.  The women in Medea and Antigone truly stood up for themselves and their families. Although Medea took her fight with Jason over board by killing her children, at least she fought.  I learned about my self that I admire women who fight for their rights as human beings.  Something that in ancient Greece, women did not have that.  It also made me thankful for all the women who came before me. Especially the Suffragettes, who fought the same kinds of powers as in Medea and Antigone.  Like Antigone, the Suffragettes faced the all male politicians to get women the right to vote.  Many hid their cause from their husbands because men did not approve of the assertiveness of these women.   
     Not only did these later plays teach me the power of my own voice, they also showed me that women have a unique role in society.  Women are meant to bear the emotional burdens of families.  Something I am learning now.  Whereas women are physically weaker and still are not treated equally with men, nor should we be, women must care for the emotions of all those around them.  Thus sacrificing their own emotional health.  For example, Ruth in a Raisin in the Sun must make the difficult decision and sacrifice to abort her baby, and she must do this alone.  Likewise Jessie makes sacrifices for her mother and never achieves true happiness resulting in her suicide. Even Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten forgets her own feelings for Jim when he needs her.  Even though this may not be as extreme in my life, I am already learning that women must make emotional sacrifices for the people they love.  My boyfriend is presently in the Persian Gulf on the USS JFK.  To keep him happy and our relationship alive I must bear this heavy burden.  He doesn't even think about the danger he is in, he just does his job.  And even his job I have a problem with.  I am a pacifist and would rather not be at war, but I support the war because I support him.  I see my self in Josie, right now I am sitting up with my "Jim" helping him through the night.  
     One of our classes themes was tragedy as a catharsis, and I found my self experiencing this throughout the semester.  Working through emotional pain is hard when you don't know what emotion is plaguing you or what is causing it.  Am I angry, am I sad, who am I angry at, why am I sad, or am I just happy?  Tragedies evoke emotions that we can't describe in simple terms.  Like the family in Long Days Journey into Night.  Sometimes things have gotten so bad that you can't find blame in anyone or any specific action.  But as the character assess and deal with their problems we are forced to look at our selves to relate and thus deal with our own emotions. Watching the Tyrone family is like the gift from the Ghost of Christmas Future.  As it ends we all want to make things better with our families, because we have seen what things could be if we remain misers with our emotions.  
     When I began this summer I was convinced I was a tragic character, beyond the help of anyone or any drug.  But using these works as a way to understand my own emotions has helped me see that I am not as far gone as I thought I was.  In fact I am already half way to being better. In someways that is just the journey of young people, just thinking you are so messed up that you could never be normal, and then somewhere you realize that life is just a whirlpool of happy days, mistakes and trying to figure out which today is. Literature is amazing in that you can find your self in the most unlikely of characters.  This is what I have learned from tragedy.  Not only the technical analysis of genre, but I learned about my self.  As we study tragedy we also study our selves.  That is the elusive quality that is so hard to define.  Tragedy requires more emotion out of us because it is a deeper look into the human soul, analyzing the parts of ourselves that we wish never existed. [AB]