Reading Modern Tragedy: Hedda Gabler , A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman

 Reading Modern Tragedy:   Hedda Gabler , A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman 

As the analyses of ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedy have demonstrated, there is no indestructible fortress of universal harmony, or self confidence, or moral order, or spiritual exaltation, or religiosity separating the classic tragedies of the past from the twentieth century.  On the contrary,  at the heart of tragedy is the alienation wrought of rationality--doubt about the gods, uncertainty about the social order and, most apparently, misgivings and confusion about the individual and his place in the scheme of things . . . exactly the terms and conditions most frequently used to describe the twentieth century and used to exclude the twentieth century from the tradition of tragedy. 

The three plays I wish to consider as examples of modern tragedy-- Hedda Gabler , A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman --are, like the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare, portrayals of individuals struggling to achieve or maintain some sense of personal identity.  The destinies of these heroes--madness--signal the penetration and exhaustion of the myths to which they attach themselves.  What is perhaps most historically significant about these plays is the resistance which critics have shown to the idea that they are tragedies. 

The modernist opponents of “modern tragedy” have been well acknowledged.  Joseph Wood Krutch, in his essay, "The Tragic Fallacy," is adamant that tragedy is alien to the modern age.  Krutch argues that tragedy is an exalted form, designed to portray nobility and grandeur--ideals which have been forsaken by the modern age. 

No increased powers of expression, no greater gift for words, could have transformed  Ibsen into Shakespeare.  The Materials out of which the latter created his world--his conception of human dignity, his sense of the importance of  human passions, his vision of the amplitude of human life--simply could not  exist for Ibsen, as they did not and could not exist for his contemporaries. 1 

Though tragedies continue to be presented, written about and discussed, Krutch argues that the modern age is so stricken by  "meanness of spirit" that our understanding of tragedy and  use of the term  are  inappropriate, hollow and jejune. 

In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner presents the thesis that tragedy ended with Racine.  For Steiner the essence of tragedy is the transcendence man achieves through his suffering.  In order for man's suffering to be meaningful, it requires the presence of some hallowed ether to which this suffering appeals.  Steiner argues that in an age where tragedy is possible 

man is ennobled by the vengeful spite or injustice of the gods.  It does not make him innocent, but it hallows him as if he had passed through flame.  Hence there is in the final moments of great tragedy, whether Greek or Shakespearean or neo-classic, a fusion of grief and joy, of lament for the fall of man and of rejoicing in the resurrection of his spirit. 2 

From this perspective,  the announcement that "God is dead" promulgates the death of tragedy. 

In the nineteenth century, Laplace announced that God was a hypothesis of which the rational  mind had no further need; God took the great astronomer at his word.  But tragedy is that form of art which requires the intolerable burden of God's presence.  It is now dead because His shadow no longer falls upon us as it fell on Agamemnon or Macbeth or Athalie. 3 

John Gassner, in his essay, "The Possibilities and Perils of Modern Tragedy," summarizes the implications of the alleged cessation of tragedy.  According to Gassner, those who argue against the possibility of modern tragedy present a vision of the modern world in which "it is said to be incapable of providing the individual with a coherent view of his place in the universe." 

The same critics who disdain a world grown  irrevocably common  are apt to deplore the absence of communion in it.  They regret the absence of tradition and belief in our mongrel culture.  With no myth or cult to assure the continuity of time-honored values, with no religion to relate the individual unequivocably to the universe, with no fixity of class structure to bind men to their place, we presumably cannot have significant dramatic action:  it cannot be significant because it cannot be communally meaningful. 4 

While individual tragedies necessarily treat specific values, cultures, and the relationships between the individual and her or his universe, tragedy, itself, does not require any specific set of values.  Tragedy does not require religious faith, or faith in community, nor does it require an exalted notion of human character.  On the contrary, tragedy engages in a constant program of reconsidering religious faith and questioning communal values.  Tragedy does not require a specific cult or culture. It does, however, require a civilization that is rational enough to discuss cultural limits.  Tragedy does not require that the individual exist in a particular relation to a particular universe, only that the individuals exist and affirm their existence through their connection to the world around and within them.  The pattern we find repeated in tragedy is that of individuals becoming in some way cut off from the universe.  This process, in turn, calls into question the values, the culture, the myths, the community, the relationships, the dreams, visions and ideologies which surround and replenish the individual. 

Notes

1.  J. Wood Krutch,   "The Tragic Fallacy,"  in Tragedy:  Vision and Form , ed. R.W. Corrigan (San Francisco:  Chandler, 1965), p. 272. 

2.  G. Steiner, The Death of Tragedy  (New York:  Knopf, 1961), p. 10. 

3.  Ibid, p. 353. 

  

4.  J. Gassner, "The Perils and Possibilities of Modern Tragedy," Tragedy: Vision and Form , ed. R. W. Corrigan (Chicago:  Chandler, 1965), p. 406.