A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire

Michael Gamer, Diego Saglia, Rebecca Bushnell, Michael Gamer, Diego Saglia

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350155060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This volume traces a path across the metamorphoses of tragedy and the tragic in Western cultures during the bourgeois age of nations, revolutions, and empires, roughly delimited by the French Revolution and the First World War. Its starting point is the recognition that tragedy did not die with Romanticism, as George Steiner famously argued over half a century ago, but rather mutated and dispersed, converging into a variety of unstable, productive forms both on the stage and off. In turn, the tragic as a concept and mode transformed itself under the pressure of multiple social, historical and political-ideological phenomena. This volume therefore deploys a narrative centred on hybridization extending across media, genres, demographics, faiths both religious and secular, and national boundaries. The essays also tell a story of how tragedy and the tragic offered multiple means of capturing the increasingly fragmented perception of reality and history that emerged in the 19th century. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

CHAPTER ONE

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Forms and Media

LISSETTE LOPEZ SZWYDKY

What can a child’s toy teach us about tragedy? The diary of twelve-year-old Benjamin Musser, written in 1902, provides an opportunity to answer this question, as the adolescent describes a play he has written to produce on his toy theater:

Saturday [November] 21. Our first play will be next Saturday and will be called The Guillotine, dealing with Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, etc. It is very exciting and terribly tragic, I made it just as tragic as I could so the audience (Julia) would be fearfully moved and cry maybe. The prison scene is horrible, where they stick Princess Lamable’s head through the bars and tear the dauphin from his mothers arm.… Fred says I’m a royalist, and I said he bets his life I am at least regarding France, and Fred said then I ought not to let my own feelings show in things I write. Well but whose feelings out to show, that’s what writers are for.¹

Ben and Fred made sense of the world, of history, and of writing through this toy that put storytelling, performance, and interpretation in the hands of children. Their understanding of the French Revolution was informed by the century and ocean separating imaginative children from the violence, suffering, and contexts (philosophical, domestic, national, and continental) of war.

Musser’s musings raise questions about history, form, and the purpose of modern authorship, while providing an entry point to examine the trajectory of nineteenth-century tragedy. The twelve-year-old defines tragedy in broad terms, invoking its political, domestic, and artistic dimensions. He portrays a grand historical event through the deaths of its most iconic and pathetic figures. He intends to create strong emotional responses in the audience (to make his sister Julia “be fearfully moved and cry maybe”). He conflates emotions, politics, and aesthetics, his emotions and emerging political allegiances. All of these elements are central tenets of European Romanticism, from its eighteenth-century roots in England, France, and Germany, to its long-term effects on modern art and culture. Musser’s miniature toy theater from the turn of the twentieth century thus functions as a site of remediation between the past and the present, providing a small-scale venue to explore large-scale suffering.

Traditionally defined through genre (tragedy), form (drama), and medium (the stage), “tragedy” might refer to a specific type of art or an unfortunate incident. Terry Eagleton calls attention to this disconnect between academic and public discourses (already in place during the nineteenth century) where, “For most people today, tragedy means an actual occurrence, not a work of art. Indeed, some of those who nowadays use the word for actual events are probably unaware that it has an artistic sense at all … [and] might be puzzled to hear it used of a film or novel.”² Modern tragedy’s diffusion from high art to the description of everyday occurrences is an opportunity to reframe conversations and rethink the cultural function of tragedy both now and in the past. Adrian Poole, for example, sees modern tragedy “liberated from the realm of art” (while not abandoning it entirely), partly an effect of “the development of the modern media that disseminate what we call ‘the news’ …” over the last two hundred years.³ Today’s colloquial use comes from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers that regularly invoked “tragedy” to describe a range of unfortunate events because “ ‘Real life’ … has to be turned into words, stories, and plots” in order to “hold our protracted attention.”⁴ Rebecca Bushnell identifies a similar process that positions literature and art as meaning-making devices: “Tragedy can shape experience and history into meaning” so that “knowledge might emerge out of the chaos of human suffering.”⁵ Bushnell focuses on drama and Poole surveys many forms, yet both scholars agree that the cultural function of tragedy primarily demonstrates how art creates and mediates understanding.

The following chapter approaches tragedy not as a genre but as a malleable mode crossing genres. As Rita Felski has noted, mode’s elasticity as a term “lends itself especially well to the complicated history and vicissitudes of tragic art.”⁶ Tragedy thrives across artistic forms and media, as well as across social and political contexts. Tragic modes help us to negotiate between scholarly and vernacular uses, moving beyond limited formalist and disciplinary approaches to reconsider the multiple contexts that inform cultural production in the past as well as the present. To this effect, Stephen Dowden argues for interdisciplinary approaches to tragedy because “literature, philosophy, history, politics, and the arts intermingle productively when seeking to understand tragedy and the tragic. They are so blended that to separate them out into discrete units would mask something crucial: namely, that tragic experience precedes our disciplinary structures.”⁷ The disciplinary silos of the modern university have tended to promote a limited understanding of tragedy by focusing too narrowly on singular genres, forms, and media instead of emphasizing comparative approaches. Even George Steiner (whose definition of tragedy is remarkably narrow) admits that medieval writers including Geoffrey Chaucer and Dante Alighieri used “tragedy” to describe any “narrative recounting the life of some ancient or eminent personage who suffered a decline of fortune toward a disastrous end” regardless of the form in which the story was told.⁸

Writers and artists rarely limit themselves to single forms, and in the nineteenth century regularly mixed genres and media. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Hardy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Mikhail Lermontov all distinguished themselves across a range of forms and genres while employing tragic elements in their works. Far from confining itself to the stage, nineteenth-century tragedy stayed culturally relevant through visual art and other forms. The following essay thus surveys a range of nineteenth-century tragic forms and media in three representative mediums through which tragedy circulated: theater, textual forms, and visual culture.

THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF CULTURE AND THE EVOLUTION OF GENRES

Raymond Williams’ Modern Tragedy (1965) challenged Steiner’s claim that post-Enlightenment secularism and the French Revolution caused the “death of tragedy.” Both scholars tie tragedy’s transformation to the period’s larger democratic project as it played out politically, socially, and aesthetically, requiring a fundamental restructuring of the mystical and hierarchal paradigms that dominated classical tragedy. Yet, where Steiner scorned the aesthetic revolution that elevated common experience as a worthy subject for poetry, Williams welcomed this radical turn, applauding “the movement of civilization” toward progressive social changes.⁹

Though it was not the only political revolution of its time, the French Revolution marked a major shift in how tragedy and the tragic mode have been conceptualized for more than two centuries across Europe. According to Matthew Buckley:

[T]he transition from traditional to modern drama is best understood not as an aggregate of disconnected ruptures—of isolated and irreconcilable formal experiments gathered about the French Revolution’s epistemological void—but as a continuous and extended crises, worked out not only in literature and the theater but also in political and social performance, of the drama’s authority as a narrative form.¹⁰

Tragedy reflects how we process, speak about, understand, and perform social and political ruptures. The French Revolution was a highly dramatic event that changed European political structures as well as artistic and social expression. While certainly informing the stage, its violence and tragic narratives also permeated culture throughout the continent.

Political rhetoric regularly employed the tragic mode. In the famous pamphlet debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, both authors invoke tragedy and use theatrical metaphors. For Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the French Revolution presented a “monstrous tragicomic scene”; responding to Burke in The Rights of Man, Paine had mocked Burke’s histrionic rhetoric:

As to the tragic paintings by which Mr. Burke has outraged his own imagination … they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Introduction: The Nineteenth Century: “Tragedy in the World”
• 1 Forms and Media
• 2 Sites of Performance and Circulation
• 3 Communities of Production and Consumption
• 4 Philosophy and Social Theory
• 5 Religion, Ritual and Myth
• 6 Politics of City and Nation
• 7 Society and Family
• 8 Gender and Sexuality
• NOTES
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright