Amy Lang
Dr. Trueman
Christianity and Civilization
11/15/18
The New Tragedy
Classical tragedy in its Greek capacity has dealt with a number of widely known myths and stories, adhering sternly to its formatting through decades of practise and study. However, with the contagious nature of the Romantic movement, the conceptual foundations of that tragedy has undergone a dramatic transformation.
At the center of most, if not all, classical tragedies sits the tragic hero. This hero is a predominantly virtuous person who, through their surrender to some fatal flaw and overstepping the bounds of mortal will, cause their own tragic downfall. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the tragic hero – Oedipus, while virtuous by Greek standards, damns himself through his own hubris and his mother through his unwitting marriage to her. Consider in contrast, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein – a romantic hero with motives spurred on by philosophical tones of the Enlightenment that ultimately lead to his demise and death. Frankenstein, like Oedipus, overstepped his bounds as a man by creating life and, in parallel to some Enlightenment thinkers, elevated himself to the status of a god, an action for which he faced morbid consequences, though not through the will of some deity or even that of Fate. He was smote by the creature he created because, though he stepped into the role of creator-god he was altogether incapable of fulfilling that role. Had Frankenstein been an Enlightenment-centered work, it would likely have focused on how the creature was brought to life and how that knowledge made God obsolete in the light of man’s reason and his prowess through it.
What exists now instead is a new sort of tragic hero, or rather a tragic anti-hero. Perhaps the qualities of heroes that graced the classics were too unattainable. Perhaps catharsis in the present day requires more compatibility for empathy between character and audience. Whatever the reason for this shift, “the modern outlook is chiefly the creation of the Romantics… [recent literature] being either an application of those romantic principles to new themes or a hostile reaction against those principles” (Bernbaum 3).
Before the Romantic movement hit its stride, classical literature and drama seemingly dominated popular opinion. This literary tendency, “founded on a theory of natural and universal law,” presented its work in a rationalized manner, exalting man and his reason as the primary power in the universe (Battenhouse 15). In something vaguely akin to opposition to this arose the “School of Sensibility,” performing heavily in terms of sentimentalism in an “effort to demonstrate convincingly its belief that virtue and happiness were the natural state of man” (Bernbaum, 34). In definition, this movement sounds much like a self-aware enlightenment; so, if this seemed to be the direction society had chosen, why does Romanticism as understood today suggest such a bleak reality? What happened?
In many ways, disillusionment happened. Several leaders of Romanticism in literature were sympathizers with the French Revolution, the early leaders of which were largely inspired by authors “whose spirit was akin to that of the English School of Sensibility,” no doubt exacerbating the issue when a revolution depending on the innate virtue of mankind and the unavoidable triumph of justice led to what is called literally and in all seriousness the “Reign of Terror” (27-29).
Even before the switch of general optimism turned off, a number of Romantic tropes were recorded cropping up here and there amongst the works belonging to classicism and the School of Sensibility. Works spanning across vastly different cultures, “the literature of gloom and graveyard, of noble savage and savage noble, of Gothic castle and cottage garden,” uncovered with the “lyrical and democratic outcry” for that which is Romanticism (339). In the confidence of human understanding we had convinced ourselves for a time that we were content with the comprehensibility of reason and either the nonexistence or unimportance of the things beyond, but the human mind craves more than it perceives. In this way, Romanticism grasps at the unattainable (Gerhard 20). It seeks to understand nature and reality, not through the objective examination of it, but through a subjective expression of it (Battenhouse 15). From this goal stem several core elements of Romanticism: a love and fear of nature, artistic tastes, individual rights and responsibility, value of “genuine emotion,” and the “reality and integrity of the human spirit” (18). Imagination was therefore prioritized higher than reason, where the “ego apprehends the character of something outside itself,” a search for the sublime in the mundane, a “free search for significant meanings in the world” that go beyond the physical senses (Bernbaum 323, 326).
Certainly, in a post-French Revolution era, Romanticism seems a refreshing bout of despair, or at least the permissions for it after the sudden failure of many Enlightenment ideals that strike the modern mind as arrogant and irritatingly optimistic. In the present day, though, there has been a resurgence of some of those tropes. Consider how often the phrase “there’s an app for that” comes up in conversation when finding a solution to an arbitrary problem – we turn immediately to technology to fulfill a need, but we do so with a sense of irony.
Where the classical Greek poets found themselves bound to stories dealing with larger-than-life figures, no such limitations exist for the Romantics; they “recorded the facts of life” with emphasis on every emotion brought about by the day-to-day (Gerhard 18-20). They recognize and express the “restlessness and the tragedy of human life” (21). But that tragedy that we see in our existence is rarely taken on by some hero, but by people; ourselves. Thus the tragic heroes we invest in must be in some form or fashion an offshoot of our own mind.
Romanticism is, in many ways, escapism (Bernbaum 301-302). Why then, does a culture wrapped up in the tragedy of its existence choose to escape that existence into things equally if not more tragic? Is it because the optimism of the Enlightenment still disgusts us? The lingering obsession with tragedy has permeated all categories of culture but the Hallmark channel. Christians, even in the purest hope of redemption through Christ can find some familiar ground in the realm of the tragic. The separation of God and man is tragic and entirely man’s own fault. The conflict between nature and man is tragic and entirely man’s own fault. Mankind had fallen out of its righteousness due to actions similar to that of the tragic heroes; man sought to become God and so in its ultimate downfall man was separated from God. Through this observation, man is its own tragic hero in the drama of reality, and now it is obsessed with the consequences. The new tragedy is only the resurgence of the first tragedy. Romanticism was formed out of the “occasional stirring” of tendencies out of Classicism (340).
It seems that the only real resolution is to abandon escapism altogether in favor in the actual reality of existence, which is easier said than done. We like tragedy, we find comfort in knowing that there are others also overwhelmed and saddened by the insurmountable futility of life. Or, at least, who contemplate it with us for a few hours, maybe even days, and then return to daily modern life.
What is there, then, to be done? To assume that the resolution to our obsession with tragedy lies within some philosophical or religious tidbit seems a very Enlightenment-era assumption. To assume that our obsession with tragedy is something to be resolved also seems spurred by Enlightenment thinking. From a Romantic platform, this phenomenon is if anything a triumph of human expression because it reveals something intangible and true about the human experience that isn’t always readily available to be experienced.
Works Cited
Battenhouse, Henry Martin. English Romantic Writers. Barron's Educational Series, Inc., 1958.
Bernbaum, Ernest. Guide Through The Romantic Movement … Second Edition, Revised And Enlarged, Etc. 2nd ed., New York, 1949.
Gerhard, E. Schultz. “The Differences between Classical Tragedy and Romantic Tragedy.” The Classical Weekly, vol. 18, no. 3, 1924, pp. 18–22. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4388572.
Works Consulted
H. E. Berthon. “The Romantic Movement in French Literature H. F. Stewart A. A. Tilley.” The Modern Language Review, no. 2, 1912, p. 269. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/3713049.
Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing, 1750-1820. 2nd ed., Manchester University Press, 2002.
Oerlemans, Onno. Romanticism And The Materiality Of Nature. University Of Toronto Press, 2008.
Richardson, Alan. The Neural Sublime. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus : the 1818 Text. Oxford ; New York :Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
Smith, Nicole. "Elements Of Romanticism In Frankenstein By Mary Shelley". Article Myriad, 2011, http://www.articlemyriad.com/elements-romanticism-frankenstein/. Accessed 15 Nov 2018.