final exam assignment

LITR 4533 TRAGEDY  Final Exam Samples 2008 Essays & Excerpts for Part B: Special Topics

Danielle Maldonado

Part B: Tragedy and its Updates

In my first essay, I asserted that it’s necessary for students to understand that all tragedy is classical Greek works that involve Gods and Goddesses. The benefit to reading a course text like Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, then the updated version, O’Neill’s The Homecoming, is that readers are able to see the evolution of the genre over the course of time. By examining these two texts, we can scrutinize the evolution of tragedy and what makes modernization natural and necessary.

In The Oresteia, Agememnon, who has just returned from fighting a long battle in Troy, and his concubine, Cassandra, are killed in a conspiracy between his wife, Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. Clytemnestra arranges this because some years earlier Agememnon sacrificed her daughter, Iphigenia, for the good of his country. Aegisthus seeks revenge for his infant brothers, who were cooked and fed to his father by Agememnon’s father. In the second part of the trilogy, The Libation Bearers, Agememnon and Clytemnestra’s son, Orestes, returns to seek revenge on his mother for killing his father. After meeting his sister, Electra, he kills both his mother and Aegisthus.  The Furies later seek vengeance on him in The Eumenides.

In Eugene O’Neill’s updated version of the story, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ezra Mannon has just returned from the Civil War. While he’s away, his daughter, Vinnie and his wife, Christine, have both taken an interest in Captain Adam Brant, who is actually the estranged son of a Mannon and Marie Brantome, a Canuck nurse who are all driven from the house to escape the shame of an illegitimate child being discovered by the public.  Christine, however, has taken a deeper interest in Adam, spending time with him in New York, while Vinnie’s main interest has always been in her father. With an Electra complex, Vinnie decides her loyalties are to Ezra and she must protect him and his failing health. Tensions have risen even higher between Ezra and Christine since he’s returned and despite his heart problems, Christine confesses to him that she has had a relationship with Adam Brant. Reeling from the shock, Ezra asks for his medication, at which point Christine poisons him with medicine that Adam helped her obtain. Vinnie rushes in for her father’s final words: “Guilty! Not medicine.”

One of the most obvious updates to The Oresteia in O’Neill’s version is that the element of the supernatural is gone. In Aeschylus’ version, Cassandra had been given the gift of prophecy but her curse was that no one would even understand her prophecies. Immediately upon arriving, Cassandra begins to prophesize a curse on the house. The chorus is reluctant about believing her but just as they’re trying to decide how to approach the situation, Agememnon is killed. O’Neill’s version doesn’t contain any supernatural prophesy, only the Finnie’s intuition that her mother would try to harm her father. We also see this in Racine’s Phaedra, which is an update to Euripides’ Hippolytus.  In Phaedra, the presence of Aphrodite is completely removed from the play, replacing her with Aricia, a real woman whom he loved. The characters in the play are held more accountable for their actions since they can no longer blame the Gods for their problems, though in Desire Under the Elms, Peter, Simeon, Eben and Ephraim all curse God.

The chorus also doesn’t exist in the same capacity. Instead of the traditional classical Greek chorus, in Mourning Becomes Electra, the chorus members are the townspeople milling around the famed Mannon mansion at the beginning of the play, spreading rumors and talking amongst themselves. This works well in the updated version because of the speculation about Adam Brant’s parents and the Mannon scandal. They also don’t become involved in what happens to Ezra and are merely introduced at the beginning of the play to offer background information to the reader.

Finally, the idea of spectacle becomes more prevalent in the updated version. Aristotle said that a perfect tragedy represses or avoids spectacle because it is “least artistic and connected least with the art of poetry.” In Agememnon, both he and Cassandra are murdered off stage. We hear screams and the curtain opens with Clytemnestra and Aegisthus merely standing over the bodies to show guilt. We don’t see a struggle nor do we watch the two be killed. In O’Neill’s version, there are multiple uses of spectacle. Spectacle is used in Vinnie and Christine’s argument when Vinnie confronts her about Adam and her intentions with Ezra. That sort of argument wouldn’t typically be seen on the Greek stage. We also see spectacle within the argument between Christine and Ezra, which ultimately leads to his death. As Ezra begins to feel ill during their argument and asks for his medicine, Christine poisons him, giving him another pill but telling him it’s his medicine. Within this exchange, we see stage drama that would typically not be seen on the Greek stage because Aristotle and the Greeks saw it as inferior to true tragedy.

While I agree that it’s necessary for students to read and learn to appreciate the classics, I believe that offering them an updates version of the play allows them to see the evolution of the genre, but also how central themes carry on throughout time.