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LITR 4370
TRAGEDY
Midterm2 Samples 2015 (midterm2 assignment)
Model Answers to Part 2. |
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Part 2. Learning about
Tragedy 2: Revise, continue, improve, & Extend Essay
begun in Midterm1
on learning experience with tragedy,
extending to include Sophocles's Family of Oedipus plays.
(Revise / improve midterm1 draft & add at least 5-7
paragraphs for 9-10 paragraph total.)
Fariha Khalil
3 April 2015
Learning
through Tragedy
Before taking this course, I
assumed tragedy meant misconceptions and misunderstanding between the
characters, which eventually lead to death in the end. I never thought about
tragedy as describing the human mind and nature, until taking this class.
According to Aristotle’s Poetics, Tragedy is an imitation of life and confronts
problems; it shows humanity in its most realistic way possible making it the
greatest literary genre. I have also learned that
characters in tragedy are not good or bad.
They can be doing something that looks bad from the
view of the society but in fact what they are doing is for a good cause.
I agree with Kaitlin Jaschek that “Tragedy is real
life because it displays the imperfections of humans, the character is not
always good or always bad they are a mixture, and at times they are in
predicaments that lead to hard decisions and/or consequences” (Model
Assignments).
An
example of that can be seen in Aeschylus’s
Oresteia trilogy.
In the first part of the trilogy, Agamemnon has sacrificed his daughter in order
to save the lives of thousands during wartime, then when he returns, his
adulterous wife, Clytaemnestra, murders him for the revenge of her daughter.
Afterwards, their son, Orestes, kills his mother and her new husband, for the
revenge of his father’s murder, but then his guilt or the Furies haunt him until
Aphrodite and her court pardons him.
One major aspect of tragedy I
now understand that I did not before is the catharsis involved in the resolution
of the tragedies. To be very honest, the term catharsis just did not make any
sense to me; I was not able to identify it in any of the readings we had read so
far, until now.
Catharsis is a term derived from the Ancient Greek,
meaning to purge,
cleanse or purify.
According to Aristotle’s Poetics “Tragedy
. . . is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain
magnitude . . . ; through
pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [or
catharsis] of
these emotions.” So, “Through
catharsis, an audience
watching a tragedy implicitly undergoes the same crisis and resolution of
disease or uncleanliness and healing or purification” (Terms/Themes handout).
An example of this can be found in Sophocles’
Antigone
where
Creon, who is neither purely good nor evil, who through
his well-intentioned actions brings tragedy upon himself and his family. By
executing Antigone, his niece, he inspires in the audience both fear and pity
for the characters who suffer as a result; his wife and son who commit suicide
and Antigone herself, whose only crime has been to give her brother a decent
burial, which Creon has denied him. These tragic events bring about a
restoration of the social balance, creating a feeling of relief and
transformational resolution to mitigate the sadness experienced by the audience.
Another example of catharsis can be found in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, where the drama
created by Hamlet’s inability to enact revenge for his father’s murder, and the
ensuing tragic deaths of himself and many others, is released by his eventual
killing of Claudius, his uncle, once again re-establishing the social order.
Another term that I have come
to understand is the term Spectacle. According to Aristotle’s Poetics “The
spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the
parts, it is the
least artistic,
and connected least with the art of poetry. For
the power of
tragedy we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors”.
In early tragedies like
Agamemnon,
and
Oedipus the King the
chorus or a messenger reported on the
spectacle using very descriptive analogies, which allowed the audience to use
their imagination without limits.
For example, in
Agamemnon,
the murder of Agamemnon is behind the curtains and is described by the chorus to
the audience, and in
Oedipus the King, the
audience does not get to see Oedipus gouge his eyes out with the pins, and
Jocasta is not shown hanging herself from the bed sheets. As Kat Henderson
stated “the more gruesome of deeds happened offstage and the audience is merely
told of their happening. This particular removing of spectacle allows the
audience to focus more on the meaning of event, than on the events themselves”
(Model Assignments).
However, as tragedy started modernizing, the
spectacle stared appearing on stage, rather than hidden behind the curtains. An
example of that can be seen in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
where the audience gets to see the gruesome killings and dead bodies on stage,
rather being told by the chorus or a messenger. So, to my understanding so far,
as tragedy modernizes, there seems to be less of the chorus and more spectacle
visible to the audience.
Other terms I came to
understand are the Oedipal Complex or the Electra complex.
The Oedipal Complex is derived from
Oedipus the King
and refers to the unusual attraction the son has for his mother.
The Electra complex is just the opposite of the
Oedipal Complex, where instead of the attraction between the mother and the son,
it is the attraction the daughter has for the father.
This complex is derived from O’Neil’s
Mourning Becomes Electra,
where Lavinia yearns
to take her mother’s place as the wife of her father. The Oedipal complex is
also identified in this play by the feelings and attraction Orion has for his
mother Christine.
I will
conclude with Umaymah Shahid’s
explanation about the necessity of learning tragedy by stating, “Tragedy teaches
the audience what is truly happening in families and how the ills within this
structure affect our society,” with that being said it brings us right back to
Aristotle’s Poetics
where he says, “Tragedy … is an imitation of an action that is serious,
complete, and of a certain magnitude…,” whereby tragedy imitates real life
situations, which I believe makes it the greatest literary genre, because it
represents the characters of both good and evil, which can be associated with
just any human being. I also believe this genre
shows the dark side of human nature, the side which most of us do not like to
think about or bring out. Things we only think about doing in our minds, this
genre shows the characters actually doing those things out in the open.
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