Simon Zhang

Stages Essay
Tragedy

In Aristotle’s Poetics, Aristotle delineates the proper and necessary parts of art
and more importantly, tragedy. By following his philisophical discussion on tragedies
and how well made ones are supposed to be like, Medea seems to be almost a perfect
tragedy. It captures most of his stated necessities for a good tragedy and effectively
creates the desired emotions within audiences. While medea is a tragedy however, the
story of Susan Smith is merely tragic. Despite the shocking similarities found between
the stories in child slaughter, the story of susan smith as told by various news articles and
reports has almost no element of tragedy in it. It follows no specific structure of events
and lacks the overall connectedness that a tragedy should have. Although both stories are
undeniably similar in plot, the methods by which an audience was exposed to them turns
medea into a tragedy while leaving the story of susan smith only as a tragic story because
once examined on a deeper level, susan smith’s story lacks the proper structure described
in detail by aristotle.
Tragedy in the poetics is separated into 6 main parts. These parts are polot
character diction thought speculate and song. Along with that, one of the most powerful
points of tragedy was the reversal of the situation or the recognition scene. Looking back
in medea then, there’s both a reversal of the situation and a recognition scene. It can even
be said that these two points were the most important parts as the climax that the plot
built up to. In medea, these parts are clearly visible in the death of Jason’s wife and in the
later death of Medea’s children. The scene used to portray this reversal of recognition
was yet another important part of tragedy, the scene of sorrow. “At last his life was
quenched, and the unhappy man… and the old father”(39) scene on the play uses a very
powerful pathos to woo the audience to sadness. While jason’s wife had been a horrible
woman described to be greedy characterized moments before her death as “she would
stretch her food out straight and look along it”, the old man however was just an
unfortunate victim. He was the one who created the scene of sorrow and as we pitied the
old man screaming “O let me die with you, my child”. The real sorrow was created in the
audience when he died as well in such a pitiful struggle to keep living.
In the susan smith story however, since the story is told in the view of various
news reporters, there is neither a scene of sorrow, nor a reversal of the situation. Susan’s
children died and while she seemed to be sad about it with her husband, there was no
straight up crying and screaming to really evoke pity out of the readers. Since news
aritcles are not supposed to show emotion, the newsfeed that we read in class was merely
a description that held no tragedy like value.
In the telling of the story, there was also a missing scene of recognition in the
susan smith stories while there was a whole 5 pages dedicated to the scene of recognition.
While Jason’s bicker with medea in the last scene may have seemed excess, the argument
was necessary because jason had to meet medea once where medea could finally
thoroughly destroy jason through her own words as he recognized the full situation. The
susan smith story however, while it reates a form of recognition in the article where she is
revealed to having confessed, this article is once again, only descriptive with no emotion.
 Along with the most powerfully emotional scenes that aristotle said were
necessary for a good tragedy, medea also follows the structure and plot described by
aristotle. In the way the plot is structured, there is always a clear purpose to it. There was
a clear beginning where Medea just learned that jason cheated on her and was despairing,
a clear middle where medea planned out the elaborate plot by talking with various
characters and was pushed along by the chorus, and a clear ending, where she succeeds
and her final conversation with jason finished off the tragedy. This form of plot structure
builds up to the climax point perfectly and can successfully describe what needs to be
described. In the story of susan smith however, there was absolutely no structure to the
story. I say this in the view as if a play were being compared to a list of news articles read
exactly the same way we read it in class. There were many repeats of information and
since no one knew what would happen, there was no real buildup of emotion. Throghout
susan smiths news feed, we always believed we knew the whole story, there was nothing
to sense or predict. Because of that, we were unexpected by the sudden turn in result but
not pushed to the level of sadness required for a tragedy.
Another important quality of tragedies not mentioned accounted for in the susan
smith articles was the fact that we were reading news articles of both current and past
information as well as little bits of information that could belong anywhere in the time
line. The susan smith story was not realtime and therefore was a poor imitation of
tragedy. By not having all the scenes happen in believable life time, a lot of information
could have been lost that a clear and straight structure could create. The difference in
story structure also allowed for medea to be a straight list of cause and effect. This way
everything is clear from one step to another while susan smith’s story jumped from a
confession and trial all the way back to the cause of all this in the last news article
showing tom findleys letter to her.