I want to find a text that helps me explore the same sort of questions I find myself returning to again and again in Greek Tragedy. In her collection, Grief Lessons, Ann Carson translates four plays of Euripides. She says in the preface, “Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.”(8). What happens to us when our souls are visible? Also, what can such a powerful moment do to and for an audience? I’m interested in that extremity of emotion. The characters in tragedy, rather than being rounded, having any kind of personality, are driven by big feelings. It’s as though the emotion completely eclipses and replaces who they are. Electra is grief. Klytemnestra is revenge. Oedipus is shame.
I am also fascinated with the everpresent concept of fate. There are prophecies to be fulfilled, generational curses, and the will of the gods which continually manipulates and controls the actions of humans. However, in Tragedy, the humans are just as responsible for what befalls them. No quarter is given, no leniency due to circumstance. Humans must operate within a system that often gives them no good choices. Sometimes they attempt to escape their fate or beg the gods to change it, but it rarely, if ever, works out well. In the face of the enormity of their fate, great heroes and mere mortals alike succumb to intense emotion, which they are equally powerless to control.
Moreover, the plays themselves are stories where the audience already knows the outcome. The audience is just as powerless as the characters they’re watching. They know what’s coming. They know Medea is going to murder her children. They know Cassandra is doomed. But they watch all the same, hoping against hope that maybe it will work out this time. The tension of the story comes from knowing how it ends, not from any kind of surprise or plot twist. These stories are not cautionary tales or morality plays. There is no promise of a happy ending if the characters simply act right. We all know Hippolytus is getting torn apart by horses– it’s his name– but that doesn’t stop contemporary readers, at least this contemporary reader, from coming back again and again.
I need to find a primary text where I can examine the emotional turmoil a character undergoes due to the enormity of fate. I will try to look at the play, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea by Cherríe Moraga, which is a reimagining of Euripides’ Medea to see if the themes are there. Also, I will look at the Oxford Handbook of Greek Dramas in the Americas, some essays that may be useful as well.