As I was reading Frye, I came across a very familiar title by Euripides called The Trojan Women. If anything is completely counter to the romances that we have been reading, to the eternal spring that seems destined to bloom within our class, it is that play in which the women and children are either led off into slavery or murdered for fear of future uprisings. I know that they are not very happy pieces, but I decided to share with you the two most disturbing scenes from the film in '71, at least by my estimation. So without further ado, here they are.
No where, I would argue, is the sheer winter of destitution more pronounced than in these few moments of the film. Innocence is lost and what remains is only the despair of a grandmother who has lost the flower of youth upon which she so passionately doted in her waning years. Within the play, and later the film, the complete brutality of, as Frye terms them, forza conquers the subtlety of froda. There is, in essence no happy ending because the weaker individuals, the last remnants of the once proud city of Troy, find no ears to hear their pleas, no individual that can fall under the sway of their words. What is left, then, seems to be a demonic parody of the romances that we have looked at so far in which death is a far kinder fate for the boy than his mother will receive.
As I write this blog, I begin to feel almost hollow, my mind emptying itself of the thoughts that are too painful, even within a fictitious reality, to hold onto for so long, and I find myself drifting back into the story of Daphnis and Chloe, which I finished for today. It is a tale, it can be argued I think, far less beautiful in its language, far simpler in its dialogue than that of The Trojan Women, but there is something equally beautiful within the simplicity of the tales of the two abandoned children who grow up to be goat and shepherds, and the spark of hope that their love creates not only for the other characters in the story but also for readers, who often want and need to believe that the world outside of their own reality is not as harsh and cruel as they imagine it to be.
In the end, then, I hope that you enjoyed the clips of tragedy from Euripides. I hope that they granted you a new perspective of lows, but I also hope that they allowed each of you to see the beauty in simplicity that the tales such as Daphnis and Chloe and The Ephesian Tale create. They do not create the dense, eloquent characters of tragedy, but, at the same time, they allow us to dream of worlds where such tragedies do not exist.
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