Tragedy

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Introduction To Tragedy

The noun, “tragedy” derives from the Greek word,“tragoidia.” Roger Dunkle discusses in his "Greek Tragedy" article on how tragedy is always associated with the "one dictionary definition [that] says: 'any play or narrative that seriously treats of calamitous events and has an unhappy but meaningful ending' or just 'any dramatic, disastrous event'," but it can also have an association with play genres. However, “tragedy” should still be considered a noun that has a fluid definition because it has multiple forms. Tragedy can be an aftermath, a type of play, a character , a feeling, or a conflict that contains multiple situational circumstances. Tragedy mainly encompasses negative connotations because it often accompanies traits of sadness, misfortune, and despair. Tragedy can be depicted as the result of a disturbing event, a literary classification, a displeasing situation, or even a movie, or playwright that evokes a high level of somberness and sorrow. Tragedy has an intended purpose to invoke grief and misery in its audience, whether it is in a play, book, or movie.

Tragedy is a public genre, or literary work found most popular in written play scripts to be performed by actors. The main character of the tragic drama is often a hero that encounters grave trouble and adversity. However, the hero’s misfortune is not inadvertent, nor is it unimportant. Instead, the misfortune is often a key element of the hero’s behavior and a true determiner of the ending to the play. Tragedy focuses on the inner weaknesses of mankind, but these weaknesses are often caused by external forces. Most audiences view the misfortune that the protagonist experiences as unwarranted. Although tragedies are known for their susceptibility to have sadness and despair, there is often an optimistic solution for the hero’s hardships. This is not to say that the entirety of the characters won’t experience anguish and woe.

Origins of Tragedy

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Roman statue of Dionysus

The Greek word "tragoidia" translates to "goat song," which could mean one of several definitions. Although not all tragedies are considered Greek, it is quite common to "refer to the tragedies that have survived the ancient world as “Greek” although tragedy as we know it, was developed in Athens." [1] In fifth century BC, it was often said that goats were "a song for the prize of a goat or song at the sacrifice of a goat," and were also used as sacrifices in early rituals . These rituals took place in the form of dance, which is considered the first ever form of tragedy. This was the prominent element to a tragedy for many years. Over time, a speaker was added, and was likely to be a priest because these rituals had a religious theme . Eventually, dialogue between the speaker and dancers took place, which lead to the introduction of the chorus. Over time, these ritualistic elements continued to evolve into the tragedy as it is known today.

In ancient Greece, annual festivals were held in honor of the Greek god, Dionysus. The goat was a sacred animal to him because he was the god of vegetation and wine. Because goats contained great value to Dionysus, it is said that rituals were held in order to promote the continuous cycle of death and life. Although tragedies have evolved over time, they still continue to have a common and reoccurring theme . The idea of human suffering has never ceased being prominent. As tragedies have developed, they have continued to raise questions such as the reasoning behind suffering, and the balance of good and evil. Additionally, tragedies have maintained their sad and dispirited qualities.

Tragedy is not considered the earliest literary genre . One of the most popular Greek tragedies in the history of tragedy was Oedipus Rex. This type of tragedy was in the form of a play created by Sophocles. The tragedy involves a Theban king having an incestuous relationship with his mother which eventually results in marriage. The king also makes it his mission to kill his father and succeeds in doing so. Sigmund Freud was most famous for his contribution to Oedipus Rex because it formed the psychological concept of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex served as the theoretical reasoning behind the king’s actions. This well-known tragedy creates a major trademark in the history is because it was greatly celebrated, and displayed the true characteristics of what composes a tragedy: anguish and distress. [2]

Main Forms of Tragedy

  • Short Story- is creative writing found in shorter forms that accompany feelings of sadness and despair
  • Novel - mainly uses a heroic figure to incur misfortune and have a pessimistic, or optimistic ending based upon the hero 's behavior
  • Novella - is a short novel , or long story, that contains the sad and despair found in most novels.
  • Poem- is a literary work that addresses difficult circumstances, and is often based on personal experiences of grief and heartbreak
  • Play- is a drama where a performance given to an audience about how the protagonist undergoes sorrowful circumstances, and plays often evoke desolation in its audience

General Characteristics

  • Mimetic Perspective — the sudden and catastrophic fall of a great person from fortune to misfortune.
  • Affective (audience response) Perspective — arouses a catharsis of pity and terror.
  • Causal relationship between character and fate — character contributes to destiny.
  • Character not eminently good or noble, a mean between goodness and depravity. Possesses a hamartia, tragic flaw or simply a mistake in judgement.
  • Universe is not perfectly ordered; achieves balance between order absurdity. Great people seem to die while the mediocrity rule.
  • Tragic protagonist undergoes a peripeteia, or a reversal of fortune; a fall that is part of the climax of the tragedy.
  • Tragic protagonist dies, or meets his/her fate, bravely.
  • Tragic protagonist achieves a degree of anagnoresis or enlightenment; also an acceptance of his/her flaw.
  • Tragic protagonist makes important choices. Her/his choices matter because they effect more than just his/her life.

Tragedies and Tragedians

Greek Tragedies

  • Euripides
    • Medea - Medea attempts to take revenge on Jason by slaughtering their children
    • Hyppolytus - Aphrodite takes revenge on Hyppolytus, resulting in his death
    • Bacchae - Pentheus, the king, is torn to pieces by a group of women, including his own mother
  • Sophocles
    • Ajax - Ajax is driven to suicide
    • Oedipus Rex - Oedipus kills his father, marries his mother, and then blinds himself in shame
    • Antigone - Antigone commits suicide in jail awaiting her execution
    • Trachinian Women - Deianeira attempts to give Heracles a love charm, which turns out to be poison

British Tragedies

  • Shakespeare
    • Hamlet - While attempting to avenge his father's death Hamlet is murdered, along with many other characters
    • Othello - Othello is tricked into believing his wife has a lover. He then kills her, realizes her innocence, and takes his own life
    • MacBeth - MacBeth commits regicide, and then himself comes to an untimely end on the battlefield
    • King Lear - Cordelia comes to the aid of her father and is imprisoned and sentenced to death

American Tragedies

  • F.Scott Fitzgerald
    • The Great Gatsby - Gatsby is betrayed by his own dream, nurtured by meretricious society
  • Ernest Hemingway
    • A Farewell to Arms - The hero is disillusioned by war, makes a separate peace, deserts, and joins his beloved in neutral Switzerland. His beloved dies in child birth and he realizes society will get you one way
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
    • The Scarlet Letter - The heroine who has committed adultery must live with the unresolved resulting conflict in her mind and heart while living out her life in a gray and tragic isolation

Some Views on Tragedy

  • A tragedy must not be a spectacle of a perfectly good man brought from prosperity to adversity. For this merely shocks us. Nor, of course must it be that of a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity; for that is not tragedy at all, but the perversion of tragedy, and revolts the moral sense. Nor again, should it exhibit the downfall of an utter villain: since pity is aroused by undeserved misfortunes, terror by misfortunes befalling men like ourselves. There remains, then, as the only proper subject for tragedy, the spectacle of a man not absolutely or eminently good or wise, who is brought to disaster not by sheer depravity, but by some error or frailty. Lastly, the man must be highly renowned and prosperous — an Oedipus, a Thyestes, or some other illustrious person. —Aristotle, The Poetics
  • First, the hero. The Shakespearean tragic hero, as everyone knows, is an overstater. His individual accent will vary with his personality, but there is always a residue of hyperbole. This, it would seem, is for Shakespeare the authentic tragic music, mark of a world where a man’s reach must always exceed his grasp and everything costs not less than everything.
    I think most of us believe that tragic drama is in one way or other a record of man’s affair with transcendence. —Maynard Mack, “Tragic Form and the Jacobean Tragedies” (1970)
  • Tragedy should be used to describe the situation in which a divided human being faces basic conflicts, perhaps rationally insolvable, of obligations and passion; makes choices, for good or for evil; errs knowingly or involuntarily; accepts consequences; comes to a new, larger awareness; suffers or dies, yet with a larger wisdom. —R.B. Heilman, “Tragedy and Melodrama”
  • A tragedy is a story of human actions producing exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man of high estate.
    In almost all [of Shakespeare’s] tragic heroes we observe a marked one-sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction, a total incapacity, in certain circumstances, of resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion, or habit of mind. This it would seem, is, for Shakespeare, the fundamental tragic trait. . . . It is a fatal gift, but it comes with it a touch of greatness, and when there is joined to it nobility of mind, or genius, or immense force, we realize the full power and reach of the soul and the conflict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which stirs not only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror, and awe.
    The central feeling [in a Shakespearean tragedy] is one of waste.
    [At the end of a Shakespearean tragedy] we remain confronted with a world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with glorious good, evil which it is able to over-come or by self-torture and self-waste. And this fact or appearance is tragedy. —A.C. Bradley “The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy” (1904)
  • In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his “ tragic flaw,” a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the character, is really nothing — and need be nothing — but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status. Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are “flawless.” Most of us are in that category. —Arthur Miller, “The Tragedy of the Common Man” (1941)
  • Thus the equilibrium of tragedy consists in a balancing of Terror with Pride. On the one hand, we are impelled to withdraw from the spectacle, to try to forget the revelation of evil methodized; on the other, we are aroused to withstand destiny, to strive to meet it with the fortitude and the clear eyes of the tragic figure. This feeling of Pride comes into full existence when the hero knows his fate and contemplates it: it is essentially distinct from the hubris which he may display, but which we cannot share in, before his eyes are opened. —Clifford Leach, “The Implications of Tragedy” (1950)
  • Suffering beyond solace, beyond any moral palliation, and suffering because of human greatness which is great because [it is] great in passion: that, above everything else, is central to Shakespeare’s conception of tragedy.
    But this is not the whole picture. Not only is the vulnerability to fortune of human distinction Shakespeare’s theme; its special liability to intense suffering and destruction. He also emphasizes the precariousness of its very quality of greatness. —A.P. Rossiter, “Shakespearean Tragedy” (1961)
  • Courage and inevitable defeat: when we confront the great literature of tragedy from our everyday world, it is perhaps these two qualities that strike us most forcible, for the first in any society is rare and the second is a prospect most men find intolerable. Without courage or endurance, the exceptional action or commitment which characterize tragedy would not be undertaken or sustained; without defeat, it would not be placed in the perspective of the ordinary world. . . . Courage without an overpowering challenge can be mere bravado or foolishness (and thus comic). Defeat without a great attempt can be mere pathos. —G.B. Harrison, “Shakespearean Tragedy” (1968)
  • On a level quite above the immediate values of the play [Antony and Cleopatra] feeling is the quality most affirmed by it, indeed by all the tragedies. For this reason, Aristotelian categories seem to me quite irrelevant to Shakespeare — and even to Greek tragedy. A fall, a flaw, a recognition: the pattern must be stretched into a one-size-fits-all dimension to fit the plays. —Marilyn French, Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (1981)
  • Anagnorisis is not simply an awareness by the hero of what has happened to him, but the recognition of the determined shape of the life he has created for himself, with an implicit comparison to the uncreated potential life he has forsaken. —Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
  • In every primitive tribe we find the shaman in the center of society, and is easy to show that he is either a neurotic or psychotic, or at least that his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or psychosis. The shaman make both visible and public the systems of symbolic fantasy that are present in the psyche of every adult member of society. They are the leaders in an infantile game and the lightening conductors of common anxiety. They fight the demons so that others can hunt prey and in general fight reality. —Geza Roheim, Magic and Schizophrenia
  • Him that stood in great prosperity
    And is fallen out in high degree. —Chaucer’s Monk, The Canterbury Tales
  • No—Gatsby turned out alright in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. —Nick Carraways, The Great Gatsby

American Tragedies

Title page for The Scarlet Letter

In the late 19th century in the United States, two authors will be one of the many to start the new tragic genre of American Tragedies. In 1850-51, both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville had created the embodiment of the tragic form just when America was booming with optimism and vying for materialistic possession. Their novels The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick will be the first of many that will succeed them in this genre. The trend continued into the 20th century playing up the pathos of the victims, who are sometimes insignificant, only for them to be engulfed by the unmatching force of the significant being who ends up destroying the victim in the process. Only the novels of William Faulkner, in their depth and powerful assault on basic tragic themes, give memorization of traditional tragic values long forgotten in his "Saga of the South".

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Literary Terms

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