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

Faron Samford

Relearning Tragedy

          When you think of tragedy, some of the first titles that come to mind are plays such as Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, and Romeo and Juliet.  Combining a theatre background with subsequent Literature studies, I felt really comfortable with my knowledge of tragedy coming into this course. These texts are covered frequently in both types of classes. While in theatre production, the ideas of tragedy and comedy apply more to the types of emotions you want to elicit from the audience, the literary definition of tragedy is more complex.  What I realized while preparing a discussion-lead assignment for Eumenides and The Libation Bearers was that while I could classify a work as a tragedy, I had never studied the genre specifically. Learning about the three categories of classifying genre has made me realize that I had always been taught tragedy primarily along the lines of the subject/audience identification for the term tragedy, as opposed to the narrative genre.

Considering a work a tragedy was a way to signify that a king like Agamemnon or some other character in a high position in life would come to their downfall, often due to a tragic flaw that the character could have avoided. While an oversimplified definition, it does tend to cover many representatives of the genre. This tragic flaw, or hamartia, presents itself repeatedly in the works that we’ve read, with it appearing in Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, Oedipus Rex, and Antigone. In Aristotle’s Poetics, this is escribed as a hero “whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty” (Poetics class page).  In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus is brought down by his pride, pursuing the investigation after being warned not by Tiresias. In Antigone, the tragic flaw is not limited to one character, but two. Both Antigone and Creon are brought down by their stubbornness. If this had been a comedy, they would have worked out their differences and celebrated with a large party, but since it’s a tragedy, they both stick firmly to their courses of action until it has resulted in the deaths of Antigone, and everyone Creon cares about.  

While the concept of the tragic flaw is common in tragedies, it is not always the case with tragedy; however. In my previous studies, I had somehow managed to miss the idea of the restoration of justice, as in The Eumenides where the revenge cycle that had caused the deaths of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra is finally put to an end by the ruling from the court of Athens. This counters the popular idea of tragedy as “someone dies at the end,” and gives the characters the chance at a more positive way of life after the end of the text. This idea of a restoration of justice also appears in Oedipus at Colonus. While Oedipus does die at the end, making it somewhat of a tragedy by the subject/audience definition, his death is not brought about any kind of tragic flaw. By the end of the play, Oedipus has regained much of his noble bearing, and begins to take control of his fate. Because of the prophecy that his death will bring a blessing to the land where it occurs, his choice of Colonus represents him choosing Athens, a place of justice for the benefit of this blessing. Like the Orestiea, specifically in the final work of the trilogy, The Eumenides, this gives Colonus an ending that follows more along the lines of the return to justice aspect of tragedy.

 When thinking of tragedy, the typical works that come to mind, as mentioned earlier, tend to come from the ancient Greek plays or Shakespeare. As stated on the Tragedy genre page, “tragedy approaches timelessness because it deals with timeless subjects, such as…the love-hate relations of families” (Tragedy Genre page). This is exemplified in the works that we studied of Eugene O’Neill. I had previously heard of Eugene O’Neill because of the Iceman Cometh, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but was unaware that he had adapted the ancient Greek tragedies. Reading The Homecoming, where O’Neill has updated the Oresteia to post civil war United States, shows how the nature of tragedy can change over time. The motivation behind the murder of Ezra is based on Christine’s love for Adam Brant, a more relatable theme at the time than the revenge cycle portrayed in the original Oresteia. Similarly with Desire Under The Elms, O’Neill adapted Hippolytus to an early 1900’s American farm. Even as early as Hamlet, tragedy was being modernized. While typically in older tragedies, the hero is a king or ruler of the society, which makes their downfall even steeper, but creates a distance between the hero and the common person. In Hamlet, the hero is not a king but a prince. This brings the hero a little closer to the level of the common man to make him somewhat more relatable, yet still keeps him at a higher level to increase the amplitude of his fall. While updating these tragedies can help them be more relatable to modern audiences, this also leads to the thinking that tragedy is relegated to works from the distant past.

Studying tragedy often involves reading the classic works of the Greeks or Shakespeare, with very few modern tragedies often used for instruction. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, is one of the few modern tragedies that I had studied prior to this class. I think this comes from modern tragedies being more identified as romantic dramas, than tragedy, due to the changes made through modernization. As previously mentioned, modernized tragedy has shifted from kings and great heroes in ancient Greece, to a prince in Hamlet, to family patriarchs in the modern works of O’Neill. While the personal and emotional stakes are just as high in these modernized tragedies, the stakes beyond this have change from being the ruling and welfare of a kingdom, to the ruling of the family home and lands. This shift in status lends the storytelling to fit more into the romantic genre, using “desire and loss as mechanisms for pushing the romance narrative forward” (Romance Genre page). This is clearly seen in Desire Under the Elms where Eben and Abbie’s desire for each other is the engine that drives the action of the play. While it still has the element of the tragic downfall being brought about by Eben’s desire for Abbie, he still reaches a moment of romantic pseudo-transcendence when he claims partial responsibility for the murder of their child. While with typical romance, this transcendence reaches a clear happily ever after, a connection can be made with this in Eben’s line, “I want t’ share with ye, Abbie—prison ‘r death ‘r hell ‘r anythin’” (Desire Under the Elms 62). This mixture of tragedy and romance in modern literature leads to the tendency to think of tragedy existing only in the older works, but its elements are still clearly in play.

Reading Lysistrata as comedy to directly compare with the elements of a tragedy really made clear the contrast between the treatments of ideas between the two. The contrast that stood out to me more than any other was how war was treated as a nuisance that was keeping their husbands busy and not at home with them. In Agamemnon, the herald describes the actual hardships of war, “wretched quarters, narrow berths, the harsh conditions” (Agamemnon 667). The way the comedy treats war as something that is just happening, but the characters don’t seem to be suffering any long term consequences from war is stark contrast to the suffering that’s depicted in the tragedy where there are real consequences to the events. Consequences and dealing with them are central to the nature of tragedies. The entire Oedipus cycle is about consequences. Even though Oedipus killed his father and married his mother unknowingly, he still winds up paying for it the rest of his life. It is not until right before his death that he has redeemed himself by living with the suffering that he caused. The consequences result in the events of Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus. While the events of Lysistrata have no long term consequences, Oedipus’s shame led to the deaths of his wife/mother, and all of his children as the action continues through the cycle. Consequences aren’t the only difference between comedy and tragedy, as we’ve explored more in this class.

The way that spectacle is portrayed in comedy, tragedy, and romance differs greatly just the consequences do, which is an aspect that I had never really compared in the different genres before this course. In comedy, the spectacle is often a key element to the comedy that takes place on stage and visible to the audience. In Lysistrata, one of the elements of spectacle is the women’s use of ordinary household items to beat back the men to hold the treasury. This creates a humorous scene that adds to the lighthearted feel of the comedy. In tragedy, the spectacle often happens offstage, such as the murders of Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra, and Aegisthus in the Oresteia, the death of Jocasta in Oedipus, and the deaths of Oenone and Hippolytus in Phaedra. While the deaths are often described, and sometimes in great detail, they always happen offstage as a way to repress the spectacle. Compared with comedies where much of the humor is visual and thus presented onstage, spectacle in a tragedy is repressed as a way to not distract from the overall meaning of the tragedy. Instead of having the audience talking and thinking about the gory death they saw on stage, tragedies push for the central idea to be the topic the audience is discussing and remembering from the play. In later tragedies such as The Bacchae, some of the elements of spectacle begin making their way to the stage. While much of it is still repressed, the scene where Agave enters carrying Pentheus’ severed head shows an instance of spectacle beginning to work its way on stage. In romance, the spectacle can either be repressed or on stage, depending on the nature of it. If the spectacle is of the hero being triumphant, it will often be shown as way for the audience to witness the hero overcoming obstacles. In the case of Desire Under the Elms, which is both romantic and tragedy, the spectacle of the murder of the baby is repressed and happens off stage. Elements such as the treatment of spectacle are something that I had never really given much thought to before studying them in this class and how it’s used differently in the different genres.

These elements of tragedy make for very complex characters. Heroes in tragedies are never completely good characters, they obviously have the flaw that will bring them down. But the villains are never fully bad characters either. In romantic narratives, there are clear definitions of the heroes and villains. Classic westerns, for example, had the hero cowboy in the white hat who rode into town and set everything right. The villain in the black hat is vanquished in the end and everyone headed towards a better tomorrow. In tragedy, the battle is often fought within oneself. The hero is also the villain, as the actions that lead to their downfall are often pursued based on what they feel is right. While romances are popular because they end with a feeling that everything will be alright, tragedy is a truer form of mimesis, because it relates to the actual nature of human beings.