 final exam assignment |
LITR 4533
TRAGEDY
Final Exam Samples 2012  Essays & Excerpts for Part B: Special Topics |
 |
Umaymah Shahid
7/07/2012
Families in Tragedy and the Oedipal / Electra Conflict
Throughout Tragedy the audience sees a constant battle between family
members. The conflict ranges from incest to murder and many of them occur within
the same household. Yet why are families the main characters in a Tragedy? It is
because the family is what makes society. If there is a problem in a family,
which is usually aristocratic due to the nature of Greek Tragedy, the problem is
shared by the society. For example, in
Oedipus the King, Oedipus’s incest is not only a problem within the monarchy
but it infects the society and the whole city is plagued because of Oedipus.
Family is the strength of society, when a family falls so does the foundation of
society. Throughout Greek Tragedy as well as modern Tragedy families are seen to
be intimate on two extremes: hate and love; where both hatred and love lead to
their demise.
Tragedy brings forth the importance of
family through emphasizing that when a family is unstable so is the state.
Another important point to note is that because of the intimacy between family
members there is a greater chance of ill feelings developing.
As Aristotle says in
Poetics, “the best tragedies are
founded on the story of a few houses [i.e. families]” (qtd. In White,
“Aristotle’s” par XIII c). This is
because one expects family members to be a support to one another, not the cause
of chaos to each other and society. The plot of the
Orestia for example is set within
Agamemnon’s family. One would think that after ten years of not being home, the
wife, Clytemnestra would greet her husband Agamemnon with the utmost love and
comfort. Yet this feeling of intimacy which is expected between a husband and
wife results in murder. The family honor and intimacy is broken and is further
scarred when the children plot the murder of their mother in revenge for their
father. Thus the cycle goes on where intimate feelings of love between family
members were quickly transformed to hate. Family feuds are not uncommon and they
make the story of tragedy even more intimate than if it involved people who did
not know one another.
Familial love and conflict is one part of the Genre of Tragedy, the other
is the recurring theme of the Oedipal and Electra Conflict. The Oedipal and
Electra Conflict is a very uncomfortable subject yet not at all uncommon for the
Greeks. The Oedipal Conflict is the conflict of sexual love of a son towards his
mother and the Electra Conflict is of the daughter with her father resulting in
conflict with the same gender parent. Though this topic is repulsive to the
average audience in today’s time, it must be seen as a real problem regardless
of its taboo status. Many times human beings push reality under the rocks, yet
in order to deal with it one must try to understand it. Tragedy brings to the
surface this taboo conflict between families onto the stage so that the audience
can identify the problem and think of possible solutions.
The Electra Conflict is seen in the Greek Tragic play
Agamemnon by Aeschylus
and O’ Neill’s Mourning Becomes
Electra. The Electra Conflict takes after Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon
who plots against her mother to avenge her father’s murder. Electra is attached
to her father and is not given much attention to by her mother, Clytemnestra.
She witnesses her mother cheating on her father and dishonoring the family. The
love and support for her father grows into hate towards Clytemnestra which
drives her to convince her brother to kill their mother.
Mourning Becomes Electra, an updated
version of the Greek play Agamemnon
emphasizes Lavinia’s jealous love for her father. In
Mourning Becomes Electra, Lavinia’s
mother, Christine ignores her daughter and tries to outshine her in everything.
This negligence from her mother drives Lavinia to naturally seek support and
love from her father, Ezra. But Lavinia does not just want attention she wants
to compete with her mother for her father. When Ezra returns home from the war
Lavinia is constantly fighting her mother for his attention, jealously hovering
around them when they are kissing, and trying to step between them whenever she
gets the opportunity. Lavinia’s love for her father at this point exceeds the
“normal” loving relationship between daughter and father, and has fallen into
the fold of the Electra Conflict which is of a sexual nature.
The Oedipal Conflict works in a similar fashion only it occurs between the son
and the mother. This conflict is seen in several Greek Tragedies such as
Oedipus the King, Hippolytus, and in
Eugene O’ Neill’s Desire Under the Elms.
In Oedipus the King by Sophocles,
Oedipus fulfills a prophecy narrated before he was born of sleeping with his
mother and killing his father. Though Oedipus was taken up by a shepherd at a
very young age, he came to the city of Thebes to help its people and won the
heart of the Queen Jocasta. Both unaware of their relationship get married and
have four children. Soon a plague takes over the city which prompts Oedipus to
find the culprit because of whom the plague began. Oedipus learns of his
shameful marriage to his mother and blinds himself to look away from the horror
he committed. Though Jocasta and Oedipus did not know of their previous
relationship to each other, they were truly in love. Oedipus gouging his eyes
out clearly reflects that he would not have married the Queen had he know it was
his mother (King ¶3). Yet the Oedipal Conflict comes in because it is not
whether or not he would have married her, but that he was attracted to her
because she was his mother. The Oedipal conflict dictates that son is sexually
attracted to his mother and in this case he was without realizing it was his
mother.
Hippolytus in Euripides’s Hippolytus
takes a different spin on the Oedipal conflict. The conflict occurs between a
chaste son and his stepmother. Hippolytus is the handsome son of the King
Theseus and has no desire for women and is proud of his virginity. His young
stepmother though finds it hard to repress her love for Hippolytus because of
their relationship as “mother” and son, and the dishonor it would bring upon her
family. Though this love is probably less disturbing to the audience because
Phaedra is not Hippolytus’s real mother, she is nonetheless filling the role of
a mother. This love, though, is cut off by Hippolytus because of the disgust he
feels of loving a woman especially that woman being his stepmother. Though
neither characters act upon this love, Hippolytus is unjustly accused through a
tablet left besides the hanging Phaedra to have soiled the bed of his father.
Due to this false accusation Hippolytus is killed by the gods yet redeemed when
his father learns the truth of his innocence.
O’ Neill’s updated play Desire Under the
Elms takes the love between Hippolytus and Phaedra two step ahead. In this
play Eben and his stepmother Abbie fall in love after trying to resist each
other. Though Eben does not want to fall in love with his stepmother, her
persuasion that she would “take [his] Maw’s place” allows him to let his guard
down (O’ Neill 39). The Oedipal Conflict is strongly present when both Eben and
Abbie kiss each other and Abbie tells him “I’ll kiss ye pure, Eben-same’s if I
was a Maw t’ ye- an’ ye kin kiss me back ‘s if yew was my son” ( O’ Neill 39).
Yet this kiss turns out to kindle a passionate fire between the two and the
maternal love transforms to lust. What would disturb the audience is not the
transformation of love, but the idea that they were kissing and trying to enact
a mother and son relationship. O’Neill dwells deeper into the Oedipal Conflict
to where Abbie and Eben sleep together and have a son. The Oedipal conflict
takes full form in this play and shows the extent to which this familial love
can develop into a forbidden love.
Oedipal/Electra complex was not only played out by the Greeks, but also
presented in the English playwright, Shakespeare’s plays. In Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, the audience sees an intimate
love between Hamlet and his mother. Though his mother thinks he is mad and at
some point takes pity on him, he expresses this rather odd intimacy for someone
his age towards his mother. The scene that brings to light such a relationship
is when Hamlet confronts his mother in her chambers about her betrayal to his
father by marrying his uncle. The scene is better understood when seen in a
film, where he is always inches away from his mother, half whispering, half
screaming, talking with passion, and tossing her around the room even onto her
own bed. The physical proximity between Hamlet and his mother suggests this idea
that Hamlet has a sexual inclination towards his mother (though she might not
be), and wants to avenge his uncle for taking her.
The Oedipal/Electra conflict sounds strange in today’s society because it is
more or less taboo. No one wants to think of children sleeping or even thinking
sexually of their parents and is a topic that is all together ignored. The
Greeks and different playwrights knew the corrupting influence of such feelings
not only on family, but on society and so addressed them in their plays. The
family is the driving force of the plot in Tragedy, yet the inner conflict
within the family gives the onset to Tragedy because it does not only effect a
few individual it effects the society as a whole.
Works Cited
King, Melissa. “All in the Family.” Final Samples. 2010. Web. 6 July, 2012.
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/4533/models/2010/f2010/f10Bking.htm
O’Neill, Eugene.
Desire Under the Elms. New York:
Vintage Books, 1995. Print.
White, Craig. “Aristotle’s Poetics.”
Online posting. N.d. Course webpage Tragedy. University of Houston-Clear Lake.
Web. 16 June 2012.
|
|
|
|
|
|
