(2016 final exam assignment) Sample Student Final Exam Essays 2016 Essay 2. Learning about Tragedy

LITR 4370 Tragedy  Model Assignments

Adrian Russell

Life is Tragic

When something seemingly terrible happens in life, a person can feel alone. Sometimes, knowing that someone else has gone through a similar trial can bring us out of the pain, if even for a moment. This is one way in which tragedy serves us. In Poetics, Aristotle describes that tragedy is supposed to “bring about a "catharsis" of the spectators” and “…arouse in them sensations of pity and fear, and to purge them of these emotions so that they leave the theater feeling cleansed and uplifted, with a heightened understanding of the ways of gods and men.” As Kaitlin Jaschek stated in her 2015 mid-term, titled “Tragedy is real, relatable, and enjoyable”, she says, “Tragedy is relatable [to] 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.” In the beginning of the class, I understood tragedy in life, but not in literature. Literature has the power not only to entertain, but also educate. Thus, in learning the literary formula of tragedy, we are able to decode the mimesis of tragedy in our lives.

In order to use literary tragedy as a rule for our lives, we must size it down to scale. Fathers in power would hopefully not sacrifice their daughters in order to garner wind for military travel, such as Agamemnon did. However, a father in today’s time may neglect his children as a sacrifice to the greater good of the family or his community. For instance, a father may not have been able to attend a daughter’s dance recital because he is a police officer and decided to stay on shift late in order to catch a criminal he has been vetting. This would “kill” the daughter because she wanted her father to see her dance, but he made the choice to catch the criminal for the greater good. This makes him a flawed hero. Subsequently, the wife may be quite upset when the father gets home. Fights would occur, repeat and eventually lead to divorce. Though the daughter was upset at her father, he is her hero and no longer in her everyday life. This puts her against her mother and whatever new male may be in their family, who can be seen as Aegisthus in Agamemnon or Adam Brant in Mourning Becomes Electra. The children in the family would then rebel and retaliate in order to “kill” the mother in some way. This could be running away to the father, experimenting with hard drugs or initiating in sexual conduct against the mother’s wishes. There, we have the makings of a modernized Agamemnon with less spectacle. If this family were to use literary tragedy as a moral construct, they might see that the father was just doing his job, he loves his daughter, the mother is rightfully upset but should not take it out on the father, and the Oedipal/Electra complex is sure to be an issue if not paid attention to.

One way that Agamemnon was already modernized was in Eugene O’Neill’s, Mourning Becomes Electra. The popularity it garnered upon release is proof that the allure of tragedy stands the test of time. The convention of tragedy is so relatable because it typically involves a family that loves and hates each other at the same time, much like the Mannons in Mourning Becomes Electra, or many families in real life. The audience can easily feel sympathy for every character in Mourning Becomes Electra. Ezra is a silent war hero trying his best to be a strong man. Christine cannot help she fell out of love with her husband, Ezra, who was away at war for years. Lavinia is rightfully upset with her mother for being unfaithful, and Orin wants to stand by his sister. We may not agree with their actions, but we can understand and relate to their feelings because many of us have felt similar ways about our parents, though potentially on a smaller scale as stated previously. The relatability of the characters and the mimesis, though exaggerated, of our own lives is what makes tragedy so enthralling.

Even if a person does not have a family, they might yearn to know them or love them while also hating them for the fact that they are alone. Not everyone falls in love or finds life funny. However, everyone experiences tragedy of some kind. Therefore, tragedy’s audience is everyone. We may see a tragedy without romance or comedy, but in terms of narrative genre, will rarely ever see a romance or comedy that does not have some form of tragedy. Even our most beloved children’s stories are typically born out of tragedy. Tragedy is the great equalizer. Pain and death come for us all from the moment we are born. Pain is the first thing we feel. We have to learn how to smile.

The reason we need the mimesis of the tragedy genre to inform us is that we cannot see our own prophecies of tragedy in our own lives. The Theban plays by Sophocles can be used as a metaphor to illustrate this example. The readers witnesses Oedipus disregard a prophecy that explains every step of his demise and blindly walk against logic into his fate. Given a moment to reflect, nearly all people could more than likely think of a time they knew an unwanted outcome was possible if they acted or reacted to a particular stimulus in the wrong way. Choices are made and people become entangles in the web of an unwanted fate they saw coming the entire time.

The reading and familiarization with ancient and even modern tragedy can help people be aware of the pitfalls that lay before them. More often than not, the prophecies of tragedy in our life are apparent. However, we become so enthralled in the drama of our lives that we cannot see what we are walking into. This is what happens to Oedipus. He knows the prophecy of his life. Regardless, he chooses to venture out and ultimately fulfill the prophecy by killing an elder man and taking an older woman as his wife. Oedipus eventually gouging his own eyes out is the true tragedy of the play because it was when he finally saw the hubris and disregard of his action that h chose to blind himself. At the same time, Oedipus could more easily see the potential pitfalls of his life in the future, proving that we cannot always see with our eyes, but rather more clearly with a calm and cautious mind.

In Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, readers witness the wrath of the most tragic of human characteristics, desire. People tend to have expectations in life. Often, these are expectations of success, happiness or ownership of particular material things. In the case of Desire Under the Elms, Eben and Abbie have expectations and desires of owning the family farm. When the expectations of people are not being realized, desires can breed in other forms. Eben and Abbie begin to foster an improper relationship between step-son and step-mother. As the story unfolds, Abbie kills the illegitimate child born of this relationship to prove to Eben that she is committed to him. Though this may seem ridiculous to us readers, there is something that strikes us deep within. Perhaps it is that all people can relate to wanting something so bad that it blinds us to our own misfortune. To be able to see this play out in an exaggerated way again can help people realize the similarity of our desires in real life.

Ultimately, tragedy equalizes society because we are fighting the duality of good and evil within us. As Nietzche explains in The Birth of Tragedy, we all have a fight within us involving our Apolline and Dionysiac nature. When we can understand and harness the convention of tragedy, we may be better equipped to navigate our lives. If this is true, an interesting idea comes to mind involving the formal genre of tragedy. Tragedy is a literary art form. Art imitates life. Therefore, we, as human beings, are the formal genre of tragedy. We are individually the creators of our own tragedy. We are tragedy. The stage directions are in our minds. The spectacle is in our actions and reactions. The pain is in our eyes. Much like the plays of the ancient Dionysiac festivals, we live almost as if our tragic lives are in competition with each other. Let us see who can hurt more. So that we may applaud the victor.