LITR 4370 TRAGEDY Final Exam Samples 2017 (final exam assignment) Model Answers to Part 2. Complete Learning about Tragedy Essay

Part 2. Complete "Learning about Tragedy" Essay

Clark Omo

10 May 2017

A Thoroughbred Web: The Interweaving of Tragedy, Comedy, and the Romantic

The development of Tragedy has been an interesting thread to follow. We started with the genre’s roots in the age of Classical Greece, briefly on through the days of Renaissance France and England, and at last to the time of America’s great playwright, Eugene O’Neill. And throughout this development, a steady stream of genre mixing steadily ebbed its way in. Tragedy begun to take on characteristics similar to other genres and styles, most notably Comedy and Romance. The Comedic enters in the form of lowborn characters taking center stage of Tragedy, and often following with behaviors akin to their status. And the Romance also enters in the form of cathartic release and faraway dreams, as well as endings that evoke a sense of transcendence. In this way, all three of these genres bespeak of a common thread that links each of them together, or else they would not be able to tie into each other so seamlessly. Therefore, it must be surmised that all three of these genres possess something in common. This is true, for they each speak of the struggles of life, yet examine them each in their own way.

For Tragedy, dealing with everyday issues often takes the form of extreme circumstances and cathartic release. Consider the Oedipus Cycle. Throughout this cycle of stories, death, fate, and destruction bombard the audience like clockwork. Oedipus, the titular character of both the first and second installments of the Cycle, is fated to kill his father and then subsequently marry his own mother and father four children through her. No matter what he does, he cannot avoid the hand he is dealt by fate, and eventually succumbs to the path he must follow. As a result, his wife\mother slays herself and Oedipus himself gouges out his own eyes and is banished from his home. While removed from common life, Oedipus must deal with issues representative of what the average man would face. Fate is a driving force in Oedipus’s story, and, whether a person holds a certain faith or not, he or she undoubtedly has reflected that some things do happen for a reason, and are, therefore, unavoidable. Tragedies such as the Oedipus Cycles force us to confront such truth, often through violent and extreme means, but nonetheless releasing in their own right. As Aristotle said: “Tragedy . . . is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude . . . in the form of action, not of narrative, through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” This “purgation” is catharsis, and it allows anyone experiencing it to release the anger, fear, and pity that they feel not only for the characters of the story but also for the world around them as well. Humans are often plagued by things that they cannot understand and situations that are far beyond their abilities to control. Tragedy asks us to face them in all their terrible beauty, and then to release the emotions created thereof, according to Aristotle.

Yet, to me perhaps, there is more than just emotional release intertwined into tragedy. We have seen throughout this semester that simple emotional release is not the dominating purpose of many of the tragedies we have read. Indeed, some of the works examined in this class often have left us unsure as to what emotions we should express. Consider Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O’Neill. In this tale we are confronted by the likes of Abbie, Ephraim Cabot, and Eben. We have Ephraim Cabot, an old and bitter man, who marries Abbie, a young woman, who then falls in love with Ephraim’s son, Eben. At first we are unsure what to feel at this relationship, for it inspires mixed reactions as well as emotions. There is the slightest touch of incest and infidelity in this relationship, as well as lust. Yet, Ephraim is old and cruel, and Abbie just wants to survive. Eben wants the farm back for himself and his deceased mother. Though these circumstances certainly inspire a cathartic release, they do much more than that. They allow you to explore what it means to love and how relationships are centered. Abbie does love Eben, and Eben feels the same way, or else he would not have gone with Abbie to the gallows in the final scene of the play. In this way, Tragedy presents such issues as love and death with starkness and extremity, which allows the audience to see them in their terrible purity and unhindered by modern ideals of realism and accuracy. Tragedy forces these painful conflicts out into the light so that the audience may see and experience them with the hope that a remedy can at least be pondered. Granted, these answers are rarely if ever presented explicitly, Tragedy at least tries to cipher them, and that in itself is the purpose of the genre anyway: to ask us how to deal with pain and loss.

Tragedy reiterates these themes even more so as it modernizes throughout the works covered in this semester. We first saw this in the works of Euripides. Euripides presents the gods of Greece as fickle and somewhat immature, as can be seen with the opening dialogue of Aphrodite: “People just naturally like to be admired; why should the gods be any different?” (1.1). With such blatant and self-deprecating language as this, Euripides brought the colossal powers that were the Greek gods down to a more human level, thus a significant change compared to the reverent and fearful approach taken by Sophocles in the Oedipus Cycle. This change signifies how Comedy edged its way into the Tragic narrative, for now even though the gods are appealing to the base desires of the common man; in Aphrodite’s case, this is vanity. Later down the timeline, we encounter Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which presents us with Hamlet coping with grief, while two gravediggers comment on the deceased Yorick. Shakespeare was not afraid to weave characters of a baser status into the fabric of his narrative, thus appealing to the growing lower classes and diminishing status of the highborn. And later in the 20^th century, we strike the works of Eugene O’Neill, whose inclusion of regional dialect further modernizes Tragedy by again giving the common people a voice in the Tragic genre whose stories for so long were limited to the lives of the nobility. In Desire Under the Elms, we are given lowborn characters that act with exaggerated movements and excessive behavior. We see this in Eben’s brothers, Peter and Simeon, who are big, dirty, and loud throughout their limited appearance. Furthermore, Tragedy also takes on the Romantic in its stories, whether it be unintentionally Transcendental or otherwise. We see in Oedipus at Colonus how the ending is somewhat transcendental, for Oedipus ascends from the world into an elusive heaven; he has drawn closer to the gods. Similarly, we see Romance come to play in Desire Under the Elms, with its great emphasis on the Romantic struggle for identity, power, and survival in both Eben and Abbie. Eben’s desire to take back the farm of his deceased mother rings with the notes of Romantic narrative; the desire for ultimate happiness. Abbie displays the same desire: to find love and peace. They both do in each other, and, even though they admit to committing a joint murder that ultimately results in them going to the gallows hand-in-hand (the supreme ‘get away from it all’), they manage to achieve their peace. Romance can weave its narrative into Tragedy as well, which attests to the fact that Tragedy can adjust and adapt according to the times.

Returning to the struggle, in the same way as Tragedy does Comedy also spars with the problems of reality. Comedy approaches human lives and its problematic entanglements by bringing them down to a much more basic and sympathetic level. Through its use of ‘low humor’ often personified by lowborn characters, Comedy attempts to present the struggles of life through the mundane issues of ordinary people by inflating them to outrageous proportions, often through excess and exaggeration. We see aspects of this in the more Comedic parts of Desire Under the Elms.  Comedy exploits the mundane issues that people face every day and present them in often excessive, witty, or crude forms. Eben’s two brothers, Simeon and Peter, are typical comedic characters exhibited with the usual excessiveness. O’Neill’s stage directions describe them as “[T]all men…built on a squarer, simpler model, fleshier in body, more bovine and homelier in face, shrewder and more practical.” They are simple men and not especially abundant in wit and intelligence. This is a staple of Comedy, for the genre enjoys using lowborn characters to achieve a sort of down-to-earth-ness that speaks of the common struggles that most people face. Furthermore, the two brothers are a pair of awkward, lumbering galoots: “They clump heavily along in their clumsy thick-soled boots caked with earth” and “stare dumbly up at the sky, leaning on their toes”. Simeon and Peter exemplify the simple-minded joe that is met along the streets, every day. They don’t think much of the world, or at least they try and fail. Comedy uses such characters to appeal to the commoner; for people of this type not only represent someone met in passing, but also the struggle of trying to grasp the impossible, but falling short. Furthermore, their immense physicality represents the same issues we face with our bodies. Simeon and Peter are everyday men; they are clumsy. Ergo, everyday men are clumsy.

Besides mundanity, Simeon and Peter also represent the more grotesque parts of Comedy. O’Neill’s description of them being “bovine” in appearance is a disturbing way of describing the physical appearance of another human. The Cabot brothers’ dumb physicality is ugly and it is meant to be so by O’Neill’s language. They are “fleshier” as O’Neill describes, which makes it seem as though their bodies are overflowing with flesh. Grotesqueness is a trait of Comedy and its purpose is as blatant as the characters that represent it: to acknowledge the ugly. Unattractiveness, unpleasantness, revulsion, repulsiveness, disturbing: all are embodied by the grotesque in Comedy. This theme allows for Comedy’s audience to face the disgusting; to see it in the light and accept their existence; for everything beautiful in life, there is something horrid. Comedy uses the ugly to force its viewers to confront horror and tangle with it. This inevitable conflict between the audience and the work does not necessarily usher a solution that may rid the world of the ugly, but it does acknowledge the existence of ugliness, which is a powerful statement. Ugliness is just one part of the patchwork of life, and once made aware of its existence, the audience can at least try to accept it.

Furthermore, another aspect of Comedy that enforces this struggle is its use of wit, or ‘high humor’. Word plays, clever quips, and other methods characterize this aspect, and, like low humor, it allows for understanding the mechanics of reality. Often this form of humor makes light of the myriad of contradictions that manifest in politics, business, and family life. Such contradictions are rife throughout existence, and they take form in many guises: the contradictory policies of your local politicians, the inefficiencies of the manager at your job, or the fact that your kids spent too much time on their phones and not enough on their school work. The ability to laugh at such things just makes them all the more commonplace; such struggles are so ubiquitous that laughing at them is a method of escape from their seriousness. We laugh with coworkers over the stupidity of our superiors, yet their stupidity ultimately affects us. At the same time, however, laughing at such things defines them as idiotic; one would not laugh at something undeniably serious or logical, for then proper and considerate thought would result. But things that can be laughed are usually not meant to be taken seriously or as making sense; therefore, they are stupid. Such is the purpose of ‘high humor’: to take such serious issues that affect our lives almost to their very core and then render them to illogicality.

And then Romance enters and offers us perhaps a better alternative to laughter and acceptance: escape. We have seen throughout this semester the multiple aspects of Romance that have invaded into Tragedy. Perhaps the earliest are the Classical plays, Hyppolytos and the more modern Phaedra by Racine. Both plays give the audience a man who dedicates his life to Artemis (or Diana) and the chastity she demands, while the wife of his father Theseus, Phaedra, has fallen in love with him. Phaedra makes use of theme even more so, for Hyppolytus is in love with Aricia, who is the daughter of a hated enemy of Theseus’s. In either case, the relationship is highly Romantic, for it is this forbidden love that drives much of the conflict evident in this plot. And it climaxes almost Transcendentally; Hyppolytos (or Hyppolytus) is killed by a bull and then gives a riveting speech as he dies (reminiscent of Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans). This story and conflict may both seem unapproachable to a degree, for they are so extreme and implausible. But they do offer a reflection of life’s struggles, and Romance threads through each of the other genres. We are often presented with things we cannot achieve: someone we want who does not feel the same or a position that we do not qualify for. In a way, such things are forbidden; restricted from our grasp. And that presents a struggle. We must cope with it in the same way as Phaedra. And at times, if this coping is not handled properly, harmful and counterintuitive actions may take place. In the case of Hyppolytos, Phaedra, because of Hyppolytos’s rejection, succumbs to suicide and blames the death on him. In much the same manner would a rejected lover commit some sort of prank upon his or her rejecter. Thus, Romanticism forces us to see that the we cannot have everything, as well as the danger of not realizing this before it is too late.

Already touched upon, another thread of the struggle that Romanticism weaves its stories with is the aspect of sublime escape from the conflicts of the world. We observed this again in both Phaedra and Hyppolytos, where in both cases the titular characters achieve escape through the ultimate equalizer: death. The Hyppolytos of both Hyppolytos and Phaedra achieves death at the hands of a curse laid upon him by his vengeful father, Theseus. Though he does not wish this to happen, he is granted final release from the wrath of Phaedra and the vengeance of Theseus. In such a way, Romanticism acknowledges that, when presented with such pain and conflict, we wish to find solace. In both Phaedra and Hyppolytos, it is interesting to note that in both cases that release is in the form of death. This attributes to Tragedy as a genre as well. Death acts as the ultimate key to peace (“To be or not to be”), and thus creates a struggle between the desire for peace or the desire for life. And yet, Romanticism’s solution is usually complete rejection of whatever life the characters currently inhabit, whether it be through death or not. From this standpoint, Romanticism declares that the only way to achieve final and eternal peace is through such a drastic measure. It is as if Romanticism says that such struggles cannot, in any way whatsoever, be solved or corrected in this life; thus, peace must come through some form of absolution, death or otherwise. It is a Tragic conclusion indeed, but nonetheless ties the two genres together.

Tragedy, Comedy, and Romanticism are not as disparate as they may seem. In many ways, the three different genres are actually three sides of the same coin; and so many of their messages, themes, and mechanics are woven around the same idea; the struggle of life. Tragedy presents it with the horrors and conflicts of death and mental degeneration, Comedy illustrates the struggle through laughter, and Romanticism reflects the desire for release from such conflicts. Together, all three of these genres create a thoroughbred web that spreads across many aspects and themes that many can relate to. Such a fact attests that not only do these three genres connect with one another, but that all genres can do so. Such is a critical aspect of the literary realm: Genres build upon each other and take from each other, thus weaving the web.