Tragic Heroine Research Articles

Marriage, Motherhood, and Self-Blame: Analyzing the Tragic Heroine’s Spiritual Suicide in Jude the Obscure

Marriage, Motherhood, and Self-Blame: Analyzing the Tragic Heroine’s Spiritual Suicide in Jude the Obscure

Hobbes’s Medeas

This article explores Thomas Hobbes’s political translations of Euripides’s Medea and, particularly, his representation of the Dionysian ritual of killing and dismembering a sacrificial victim (sparagmos). To answer the question of what forms political theology may take in modernity, I contend that Hobbes seeks to reverse the political theological meaning of ancient Greek sparagmos—which was originally depicted in Euripides as a legitimate religious sacrifice whose objective was to reunify the polis—by turning it into a senseless act of political violence that will dissolve the civil state into competing interest groups or body parts. If Hobbes seeks to expel religious sacrifice from his political state into archaic pre-history, however, the article goes on to argue—via Bramhall, Schmitt, and Cavarero’s revisionary readings of his work—that the philosopher’s critique of Medea ends up bestowing a legitimacy upon the tragic heroine that disarticulates the political theological unity upon which his Commonwealth is founded. In the tragic figure of Medea, Dionysian sparagmos returns to dismember and even potentially consume the body parts of the Leviathan.

Corpses in Clinical Space and the Preposterous Temporality of Pandemic Care.

Articulations of the chasm between ideal and attainable forms of care surfacing throughout the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic have highlighted the proliferation of unceremonious deaths associated with inequitable conditions. This paper reconsiders the preposterous temporality of pandemic care by following corpses in and out of clinical space. Written from the perspective of a MD/PhD student's encounter with a corpse replacing the patient on the medicine ward prior to pandemic onset, this paper asks how corpses might interrupt narratives of clinical care. Sifting through Eugène Ionesco's 1954 play "Amédée," Édouard Glissant's rejection of the tragic heroine, Achille Mbembe's positing of viscerality as autopsy, and David Marriott's theorization of blackness as corpsing among other engagements, I conceptualize how corpses might refigure clinical spaces as preposterous realms wherein distinctions between a before and after falter. Considering the continuities between an apparent before and after, I argue that the contemporary concerns punctuating the pandemic as a unique period in time might not be as contemporary as they first appear. Taking cues from literary analysis and fictional works, I engage the corpse as a figure that prompts a rethinking of what might constitute ideal as well as failed care. I argue that corpses in clinical space signal a critique of the ideal narrative arc, one that centers the medical provider as heroine/hero in the midst of tragedy. Turning to the corpse as an interruptive figure, I ask what this dominant narrative might ultimately demand of its cast of characters-protégé, provider, and patient.

Book Illustration and The Deserted Village

Book illustration is enjoying new interest. The Deserted Village attracted illustrators from the beginning. By the mid-nineteenth century, images of its rustic characters appeared regularly alongside the verse. During the final decades of the eighteenth century, three graphic artists reimagined Goldsmith's narrative as tragedy. Their transformations show the need for a term to describe the full interplay of verbal narrative and visual interpretation: the imagetext. James Gillray, John Keyse Sherwin, and Francis Wheatley each represent two characters from the poem, the bashful virgin and the dutiful daughter, as a single tragic heroine. In two pairs of freestanding prints, Gillray and Sherwin recast the then-and-now structure of the poem as a drama of displacement. These prints are imagetexts in a dual sense. They reflect a printing practice dating back to the sixteenth century of showing a text and an image in tandem, and they place the image in an independent collaborative relation. In a third print and then in related book illustrations, Francis Wheatley depicts the daughter as the prime victim of the trade in luxury. Like Sherwin, he represents an abandoned maiden as an allegorical figure of the land, following Charles Le Brun's decrees regarding how the passions should be depicted. These visual narratives reflect the academic theory of the sister arts as filtered through the lens of sensibility and indicate social commitments largely lost in the nineteenth-century illustration of the poem.

Ophelia, more or less. Intersemiotic reinterpretations of a Shakespearean character

Abstract Ophelia, Shakespeare’s most tragic heroine, seems to be the character who has generated much more enthusiasm on the part of visual artists than on the part of literary critics. Consequently, there are a high number of artefacts, produced starting with the nineteenth century, which have been inspired by Hamlet’s unfortunate bride. Of this assortment of artefacts, we have picked some to deal with here. In analysing them, we survey through the history of the heroine’s representation in various visual media, comment on them from the point of view of intersemiotic translation, and verify, in broad lines, the hypothesis that they may be tributary to a number of factors ranging from some connected to the artist’s own identity and subjective interpretation of the original to factors connected to more general stereotypes, beliefs, attitudes, and socio-cultural trends.

Love, Betrayal, and Death

What is the relationship between art and life, theatre and history? Two contemporary works, David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly and Chen Kaige’s film Farewell My Concubine, raise this question with men’s cross-dressing performances of tragic heroines, which complicate different theatrical aesthetics and intertwine theater with fictionalized reality based on actual historical events. By presenting twists of characters’ real-life relationships entwined with Western and Eastern operatic fantasies, Hwang and Chen complicate the 19th-century European romantic opera cliché of “tragic women dying for love” and classical Chinese theatrical aesthetics of presentational performances. The intertwining of art and life, in evolving theatrical performances contextualized in the 20th-century history, reveals situations of irony in the lives of minor characters caught in grand historical movements. The cultural figures of tragic heroines allegorized by histories channel East and West in characters’ suspected betrayals and deaths, offering cultural translation and historical allegories. This paper examines how male characters perform tragic female roles to mediate their relationships to others and respond to given realities. Whereas previous discussions focus on general gender politics, my approach to the East-West tension through comparing aesthetic traditions and histories evolved in performances will offer the subtlety previously neglected. Reading through the lens of various crossings redefines the dichotomous East-West tension as a relationship of mutual inclusion and reveals the West’s underestimation of the East in the past decades. The undervalued theatrical power to replace reality at the end of both works enables us to read individuals’ operatic suicides as self-salvation and Hwang’s character Song’s survival, ironically, as a tragedy.

Scènes uit een tragikomisch huwelijk

Discussions about the interpretation of Plautus’ self-proclaimed tragicomoedia Amphitruo usually centre on the interpretation of the character of Alcumena, the wife of the eponymous general: should we see her as a tragic heroine or as a comic character? In this paper I will elaborate a third option, in which Alcumena is interpreted as a comic character precisely because her tragic features are grotesquely parodied, and I will argue for an analysis of the Amphitruo as a parody of tragedy. Mercury plays a central role as the divine seruus callidus who brilliantly directs the various reversals throughout the play and ‘performs’ the transition into a tragicomedy on the stage.

Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age

Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age

Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age

Diamonds and Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age

A STUDY IN THE LIGHT OF ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDIES- “MADNESS” AS A TRAGIC ELEMENT

Since the beginning of time, madness has been ascribed to the sacred. This was also the case for the Ancient Greeks. They believed that their anthropomorphic deities were involved in all aspects of life. So they characterized madness as a condition sent by the gods. The connection between madness and the divine powers has also been the theme of Ancient Greek poetry. In Homer’s The Iliad, at the fiercest moment of the war, the enraged Hector wears the armor of Patroclus and there enters into him Ares the god of war, his limbs are filled with might. In The Odyssey, when the suitors of Penelope gather for dinner, Athena makes them laugh uncontrollably and then makes them cry. The theme of madness can also be seen in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Although insanity still is a divine punishment in those plays, there are other reasons for the madness of tragic heroes and heroines. Feelings of guilt, sense of responsibilty, sadness, shame, honor and arrogance may be mentioned among them. In the Sophoclean tragedy “Aias”, Aias goes mad and kills Greek cattle believing that it is the Greeks. After returning to his senses, he kills himself out of shame. In the Euripidean tragedy “Medeia”, after Iason’s betrayal, Medeia goes mad and takes vengeance on Iason by murdering Glauce, his new wife as well as her own children. Our aim in this study is to examine the notion of madness in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Marina Tsvetaeva on the theater stage: a tragic heroine or an intellectual author? (based on periodicals)

Marina Tsvetaeva on the theater stage: a tragic heroine or an intellectual author? (based on periodicals)

CHALLENGING TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE LAWS IN THE DUCHESS OF MALFI: LOVE OR LONGINGS OR DEFYING PATRIARCHY?

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster speculates into the tradition of Elizabethan marriage, laws regarding marriage, its violation and the consequences it brings. The drama continues to reverberate among today’s audiences because of the majestic appeal of the Duchess and her enterprising tryst at rebuffing the ‘authority of social conventions and norms’. The Duchess has been credited for her attempt and bravery to choose and win over a spouse for love. Wedding, one of the most important moment of a woman’s life, was seen from a completely different perspective, temperament and in a ‘non-secular’ impression. The woman during the Elizabethan age had absolutely no choice in selecting her prospective groom. Women were seen subservient to men. Elizabethan woman were raised to believe that they were inferior to men and that they must abide by ‘the other’s verdicts’. Disobedience was a crime against religion and the consequences were monstrous. Webster uses majestic traits to exemplify the Duchess’ feminine strength of virtuosity and greatness which instil in the modern audience’s empathy and respect for the Duchess. This paper tries to revisit The Duchess of Malfi, decoding these socio-cultural and religious perspective and the ways of the aristocracy used by Webster, contributing to the eventual downfall of the Duchess. This paper also delves deep into documenting Webster’s attempt to portrays her as a tragic heroine and victim of law. KEYWORDS: The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster, Elizabethan marriage laws, Violation of laws, Tragedy

Elektra Mitinin Tekrar Yaratılmasında Eshilos, Sophokles, Euripides ve Menelaos: Sanatlararası Bir Diyalog

The present study focuses on the tragic heroine, Electra, who rose to prominence in the Athenian dramas of the fifth-century BC, particularly in Aeschylus’s Choephori, Sophocles’s Electra and Euripides’s Electra, but this enigmatic figure continued to stir the imagination of the artists of the subsequent generations to the extent of making its presence memorable not only in literary texts but also in visual arts and music. This paper attempts to reveal the ways in which Electra myth has delighted and inspired various artists by stressing out the peculiarities of this myth that never seems to go out of fashion. It can also be observed that Electra’s figure, even sculpted in marble severity, continues to arouse both pity and admiration in her quest and demand for justice as well as her attempts to re-establish the religious, moral and societal values.

신여성의 소설 실험: 모나 케어드의 『아즈라엘의 날개』

This article aims to examine Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889), not merely as an extension of her argument of the essay “Marriage”(1888) on Westminster Review which ignited a firestorm of controversy on ‘modern’ marriage, but also as an experiment on various devices of the contemporary fiction-Bildungsroman, domestic novel with a marriage plot, and the murderess of the late-Victorian Sensation Fiction.BR Viola Sedley finds herself trapped in oppressive relationships among her family and harassed by Sir Philip Dendraith and his son (whose name is also Philip). Her growth as a human being is seriously distorted and stunted, which characterizes Viola’s adolescence as ‘anti-Bildung’. Her family members force her to marry Philip to avert their financial ruin. Viola soon discovers that her married life is a “living-hell”, because of Philip’s gaslighting and stone-cold abuses including marital rapes, rarely portrayed in fiction during the Victorian era. While dreaming of escape with Harry Lancaster, she stabs Philip to death, to avoid the immediate rape. However, Caird does describe Viola neither as an adulteress-murderess of a Sensation Fiction, nor as a tragic heroine like Thomas Hardy’s Tess.BR As an early ‘New Woman’ novelist, Caird not only covers various topics surrounding the debate over the Victorian marriage, but also appropriates several novelistic devices and conventions to dramatize the typically thwarted progress of a Victorian woman’s life.

The Metamorphosis of the Tragic Hero - The Greek Classical and Post-Classical Renaissance in Contention

Just as tragic heroes and heroines have been identified with different eras and cultures, the classical ideal of the classical and post-classical Renaissance will be incomplete if the concept of tragedy is not focalized. This paper, therefore, looks at how both periods delineated their tragic heroes, based on their actions portrayed in the plots of their plays. The paper, using textual analysis, provides extracts from William Shakespeare's King Lear, as the main text to present King Lear as the post-classical tragic hero. This is juxtaposed with extracts from Sophocles’ King Oedipus, as the main text, and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, as a hero supporting text to present Oedipus as the classical hero. Whereas textual analysis shows that the delineation of the tragic hero lies in the source of the tragic situation – the concept of hamartia of the classical period, the post-classical Renaissance period portrays the tragic hero on the basis of the weakness of character.

The 'Bottle Villa' Of Illusions and Desires: A Critical Study of The Tragic Heroines of Atwood's Surfacing and Tenesse William's A Streetcar Named Desire

"Obstinately she tried to control and defy her destiny and to know her story is to be inspired by pity and terror" - Elain Dundy
 The literary landscape resounds with the echoing hollering of the great tragic heroes, whose Homeric lives had made the literary vista resplendent. But amidst the din, there exists the complex caricatures of tragic heroines who stuns us with the sheer intensity of the paroxysm that is their lives. Tennessee Williams and Margaret Atwood has given the world two such heroines whose lives are akin to the constrictor knots i.e their lives tighten and strangles them as they try to escape from it. This paper is a novel attempt to collate the tortuous characters of these women who has intrigued the audience with their fascinating psyches.

B is for Baempaieo: the rise of K-vampires

ABSTRACT This article discusses the construction of K-vampires in popular Korean television dramas, focusing on three series that feature central vampire characters: Vampire Prosecutor, a crime procedural running for two seasons in 2011 and 2012, its spin-off, Vampire Detective and a medical drama Blood. The main protagonists in these series are all simultaneously vampires and members of professions designed to help humans: a lawyer, a detective and a surgeon. Constructed as parallel to humans, the vampires are portrayed as free-willed individuals striving to overcome their condition. The article argues that the humanization of K-vampires can be seen as a hybridization strategy blending the characterization of the ‘reluctant’ vampires known from Western post-millennial fiction with some features of the Korean kumiho, a supernatural shape-shifting fox creature that desires to become human. The article also proposes to read the series in the Neo-Confucian context, particularly in relation to its social and gender norms. It argues that while the male vampires in the series function chiefly to deliver critique of Korean neoliberal society, with the heroes modelled on the virtuous seonbi scholars and the villains described as sociopathic capitalists, the female vampires are mostly portrayed as tragic heroines, vilified for their moral transgressions and redeemed through selfless sacrifice.

Momma Rose: An Aristotelian heroine in the mother of all musicals

The character of Rose from Gypsy has been compared to tragic characters such as Medea, King Lear and Willy Loman. She has been credited as one of the most psychologically complex characters in musical theatre history and is a role coveted by performers. Equally appalling and compelling, Rose, like characters in ancient Greek tragedies, is an imperfect human struggling to do her best in difficult situations but is ultimately misguided and suffers a tragic reversal of fortune. This article applies dramatic theory from Aristotle’s Poetics and Arthur Miller’s article ‘Tragedy and the common man’ to discover the dramaturgical practices the authors of Gypsy used to structure Rose, a figure from musical comedy, within the theoretical constructs of a tragic heroine.

Sahnedeki Deli Kadınlar: Euripides'in Medea, Henrik Ibsen'in Hedda Gabler ve Eugene O'Neill'in Günden Geceye Adlı Eserlerinde Kadın Deliliği

Throughout the history, women challenging their gender roles have mostly been labelled as hysterical, mad or dangerous by the patriarchal society. This long-seated tendency to associate women with insanity has also been echoed in drama. In that regard, this paper will explore the representation of nonconformist women who transgress the boundaries of imposed normality in Euripides’s Medea, Henric Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Financially dependent and restless with societal expectations, Medea, Hedda and Mary are tragic heroines of different eras resisting patriarchy that finally bring them on the verge of madness. After having sacrificed their aspirations or relative freedom for their marriages, those atypical female protagonists meet on a common ground in their repudiation of the dictated gender roles and motherhood image, which leads Medea to murder her own sons and Hedda to end her life while leaving Mary no choice than cutting off from reality through morphine.

‘Neither Completely Guilty nor Completely Innocent’: Representing Injustice in Jean Racine’s Phèdre

The eponymous protagonist of Phèdre emerges as a true tragic heroine by exercising her own free will to commit wrong instead of being a mere victim of fate. Criticism focusing on injustice has tended to shine light on Thésée, denying Phèdre royal sovereignty just as French Salic law did to queens. By shifting the spotlight from Thésée to Phèdre, and from the idea of judgment as a means of redressing injustice to injustice resulting from the challenges of governance and self–governance in royal leaders, we will see that Phèdre's gender has tended to obscure the important connection between injustice and the exercise of monarchical power. The gender of the eponymous heroine of the play operates as a cover: by associating wrongdoing with a female monarch, a literal impossibility in France, Racine is able to delve into particularly controversial aspects of unjust governance as experienced in his day and age.