An event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe is known as tragedy.
A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.
Aristotle
Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy.
Jean Racine
The word "tragedy" appears to have been used to describe different phenomena at different times.Tragedy is derived out from Greek word tragÅidia, mean "he-goat-song". Scholars suspect this may be traced to a time when a goat was either the prize in a competition of choral dancing or was that around which a chorus danced prior to the animal's ritual sacrifice.
In another view on the etymology, Athenaeus of Naucratis says that the original form of the word was trygodia from trygos (grape harvest) and ode (song), because those events were first introduced during grape harvest
Writing in 335 BC (long after the Golden Age of 5th-century Athenian tragedy) , Aristotle provides the earliest-surviving explanation for the origin of the dramatic art-form in his Poetics, in which he argues that tragedy developed from the improvisations of the leader of choral dithyrambs (hymns sung and danced in praise of Dionysos, the god of wine and fertility). So it is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization.
MODERN TRAGEDY
A modern tragedy is a play in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middle-class or lower-class individuals.
The term ‘Tragedy’ is used in a common parlance, and yet it cannot be reduced to a formula, for it has so many shades that it actually defies a logical analysis. An American critic has admirable summed up Tragedy in a few words: “Courage and inevitable defeat.” Now-a-days we can never think of a Tragedy without an unhappy ending. But the Greeks did. Philoctetes by Sophocles, for example, has no unhappy ending. There is a similarity between the ancient Greek Tragedy and a modern Tragedy. The hero and certain other characters are caught in a difficult situation.
The character and plot in most of Tragedies are linked up. In Greek Tragedies fate played a very important part, but after the Renaissance character became more and more prominent. In some of Shakespearian Tragedies, despite the importance of character, the motivation of action comes from the supernatural forces or even external circumstances. In modern Tragedies, the hero is often the victim of social forces.
Tragedy, F. L. Lucas maintains, had three different meanings in the three periods of literary history. In ancient times, a Tragedy meant a serious drama; in medieval times, a Tragedy meant a story with an unhappy ending; and a modern Tragedy is a drama with an unhappy ending.
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, though written in the late 1800s, is a modern tragedy as it presents a woman's journey towards self-liberation in a patriarchal society.
From the opening scene of the play, Nora Helmer's clearly the subordinate in her marriage with Torvald. Many of his pet names towards her are references to animals which denote that her role in the marriage is a less than human one. Nora's positioned herself into a doll-like role, as she accommodate Torvald's needs; there is little to no reciprocity. The tragic heroine, Nora is an everyday woman. She is special in that she is very attractive and has lots of admirers, but she is still, for her time period, quite a typical woman in a typical house, in a typical financial situation, with a typical husband, and raising typical children. Her tragic downfall began taking place when she decided to commit fraud to rescue her husband, a decision that anyone in a similar situation can make. The plot of the tragedy spirals from there and Nora becomes subjected to blackmail, must confide in her husband and learns that he is not the genuinely caring, selfless person she believed him to be, all of which are events that can happen to anyone.
For the maternal calling of the conventional nineteenth-century woman is thwarted in Hedda by tendencies that were at the time viewed as masculine. The influence of her motherless, father-dominated upbringing is everywhere evident: in her taste for horses and pistols; in her eager anticipation of a contest between Tesman and Loevborg for the available university professor¬ship; even in General Gabler’s portrait, which is described in the opening stage directions, before we meet any of the actual characters, as occupying a prominent place in the Tesman’s’ drawing room. Explaining the play’s title, Ibsen wrote:
‘I intended to indicate thereby that as a personality she is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife’.
As in A Doll’s House, the clash between Hedda’s unfeminine inclinations and the step she takes down the feminine path of marriage and, inevitably, pregnancy results in hysteria. Her gestures are as telling as her words: drawing the curtains, seeking fresh air, walking nervously around the room, raising her arms, clenching her fists, drumming her fingers, physically abusing Thea Elvsted. And as in the case of Nora, her hysteria finds release in music, in the ‘wild dance tune’ she plays on the piano. Yet unlike Nora, Hedda is still too much the victim of traditional inking to move from hysteria to feminism.
Ibsen’s awareness of the difficulties of motherhood on the one hand and of the overwhelming power of the myth of maternity as the proper calling for women on the other hand is expressed by several memorable instances in the major prose plays in which women who have either lost their children or never had any remain trapped in maternal thinking toward metaphorical offspring. Although the tragic secret at the heart of The Master Builder is the Solnesses’ loss of their infant twins as the indirect result of a fire that had destroyed their home years before, Aline Solness reveals that she in fact grieves not for the babies but for her nine dolls lost in the blaze, which she had carried under her heart ‘like little unborn children’.
This consideration sheds new light on Ibsen’s claim late in life that it is the women who are to solve the social problem. As mothers they are to do it. And only as such can they do it. Whereas this statement is often inter¬preted to mean that Ibsen viewed motherhood as the proper calling for women, he may in fact be suggesting that it is the only vocation truly open to them. The many female figures in his plays demonstrate the enormous and often detrimental influence of the notion that maternity is woman’s duty: women who have motherhood imposed on them against their will, mothers unsuited to motherhood, childless women for whom the maternal model is so strong that they take on foster or metaphorical children.
Ibsen’s implication that the best mother is the one who assumes this calling not because of biological determinism, as was so often the case in his day, but out of free choice, finds its most wholehearted endorsement in The Lady from the Sea. In a kind of counterpoint to A Doll’s House, where Nora must create her own freedom by leaving behind the domestic environ¬ment which has confined her, Dr Wangel grants his wife Ellida the freedom to choose between joining the mysterious seafaring stranger to whom she has been so powerfully attracted and remaining with Wangel and his chil¬dren. Where Nora exchanges motherhood for autonomy, Ellida is able to truly embrace (step) motherhood only because Wangel has rendered her autonomous.
The Lady from the Sea may stand as the last word on the question of Ibsen and feminism. For insofar as it reverses the pattern of A Doll’s House, it does not present women with the choice between motherhood and soli¬tary New Womanhood but rather powerfully advocates women’s right to choose their destiny and combine roles as they desire. Supporting the belief that a woman’s mind and body are hers to control as she wishes, Ibsen’s oeuvre allies him with feminist thinkers not only of his era but of our own day as well.
