Tragedy and horror are not too different from one another. Though most Greek tragedians wrote the violence and grotesqueness of their plays off stage, vile and cruel imagery has always existed. Euripides did not shy away from speaking about disgusting events. In his Hippolytus, the Messenger describes the ripping of limbs, the tearing of innocence. Latin tragedy further explored horror; Seneca’s Thyestes details the feuding of brothers and the subsequent murder and cannibalism (where blood serves as wine). Daphne Du Maurier’s the Birds (1952) is also a horror story; it illustrates a hoard of apocalyptic birds that ravage a family and its town. Du Maurier, though preying on humanity’s fear of birds, uses the animals as a larger metaphor for human warfare and machine violence. Through this lens, the Birds and Greek Tragedy are similar: they both explore manmade tragedy, and more specifically, the human-directed tragedy of war. Du Maurier and the Greek Tragedians critique manmade tragedy by establishing an autonomy of choice and utilizing this choice to symbolically turn human beings into weapons.
The Greek Tragedies, though primarily considered to be caused by fate, also come down to personal choice. It is a unique contradiction of no autonomy and full responsibility throughout the tragedies. Yet, perhaps, there is more autonomy in these characters’ lives than what they are typically credited with. Walter Agard’s journal article “Fate and Freedom in Greek Tragedy” discusses multiple instances of “freedom” throughout the tragedies including dramas by both Aeschylus and Sophocles. In Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, Orestes murders his mother purposefully; he tells the audience: “Apollo bids me kill my mother. But even if I didn’t trust his oracle, I’d do it anyway”[1]. In Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the Chorus speaks of autonomy, telling Philoctetes: “It is you, you who chose this […] This fortune comes from no other outside source nor from one stranger than you are”[2]. The ideas of “doing”, “action”, and “choice” permeate these quotes. Thus, despite the gods holding a higher power, the tragedies make a point: mankind is free to decide how (and how willingly) they submit to their destiny. Orestes may not have had the power to avoid murdering his mother, yet his loss of humanity, and his willingness to become a killer, undermine his dignity. “Men are warned what to avoid but are free to choose as they will. Those who give way to their own weakness are at least accomplices of the gods in the resulting calamity”[3]. Therefore, the Greek tragedies dabble with the concept of responsibility, avoiding the greater debate by placing fault with the gods, but forcing the characters to be “accomplices” of the gods. This paints them as culpable, decisive beings. In doing so, tragedy becomes man-made rather than unavoidable.
Daphne Du Maurier’s birds are given a human quality, endowing them with the power of autonomy and choice. Metaphorically, the birds represent a larger, more human scale of violence. In Mary Ellen Bellanca’s article “The Monstrosity of Predation in Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’”, Bellanca states that the “bloodthirsty birds figuratively encode the voracity of human’s historical predations on each other”[4]. Thus, the bird’s existence, beyond how they act and why they do so, is emblematic of a violent human history. The birds are almost human and therefore have the power of determination. We see this autonomy when “the birds, in vast numbers, […] [attack] anyone on sight […] [and begin] an assault upon buildings”[5]. Du Maurier’s language is notable; the use of “attack” and “assault” imply a decision-making process. This process endows the birds with responsibility for their actions. Du Maurier further explores the autonomy of this tragedy by providing the birds with intellect: “[The birds’] got reasoning powers […] they know it’s hard to break in here. They’ll try elsewhere. They won’t waste their time with us”[6]. This personification of the birds paints them as the masters of their own destruction. They choose their suicide, they choose to instill fear, just as Orestes chooses to kill his mother, or Phaedra chooses to kill herself. Du Maurier endows a human power to the birds and then chooses to have them wreak tragedy.
The Greek Tragedians and Du Maurier both explore what a man-made tragedy means. They do so by making their characters and victims responsible for their own pain. The tragedy that ensues is a result of their actions rather than a result of fate. Du Maurier and the tragedians then take man-made tragedy one step further: they depict war as a man-made disaster, turning their characters into mechanical pawns of tragedy.
Although Greek Tragedy is littered with war (just as Greek history was), Aeschylus made sure to demonstrate its inhuman effects on society. Seven Against Thebes, which is a “play about war, a play ‘full of Ares’ as one ancient critic put it” is a prime example of this approach to tragedy[7]. The tragedy, which tells the tale of two armies, reduces the soldiers to their decisions. Thomas Rosenmeyer points out an important choral ode in “Seven against Thebes. The Tragedy of War”; the chorus sings: “Listen to the clang of the shields, do you hear it, my eyes are on it, the clash of many spears”[8]. Aeschylus’ emphasis on the sounds of weaponry reduces human beings to their decisions and detaches them from humanity. Their choice to engage in war directly causes the machinery of tragedy. Rosenmeyer summarizes this idea, he writes: “Behind the imposing front of armor and equipment the men themselves are barely noticed. The concentration on the war machine, on the gear and the artillery, is deliberate”[9]. Thus, when the chorus describes “the clash of many spears” and the “clang of the shields”, Aeschylus is turning the individuals in the army into weapons of war. The tragedy they have created (war itself), creates a further, cyclical tragedy: dehumanization. “For war, when seen whole, detaches itself from the feelings and motivates of individual souls and turns into a distant machine”[10]; the distant machine, in this case, are the human beings guided by their inclination towards pain and suffering. Seven Against Thebes serves as a lesson, one that warns against the tragedy of war and its destructive societal impacts.
By Du Maurier’s 1952 short story The Birds, society has not learned from tragedy. And thus, similarly, Du Maurier reduces her living beings to machines of destruction. The Birds can be contextualized as a post-World War II dystopia, representing an air attack that destroys civilization[11]. While Du Maurier has bestowed the birds with the human power of decision, she also punishes them for their apocalyptic tendencies. They ultimately come to represent “destruction [that] rained from the sky with powerful human-made weaponry”[12]. We see this in the shift from the birds as beings that can reason (“They know”, “They’ve got reasoning powers”), to objects with “wings brushing the surface, sliding, scaping, seeking a way of entry. The sound of man bodies, pressed together, shuffling on the sills”[13]. They are endowed with the “instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines”[14]. Thus, we see the birds transition from creatures that can replicate human intelligence to beings that suffer as a result of their actions. The birds have created tragedy, particularly for the family who suffer as a result, but they also lose all autonomy and selfhood due to the war they ensue and endure. Just as Aeschylus reduces the soldiers to the sounds of the shields, De Maurier reduces the birds to the identity of bullets and bombs. The tragedy lies in the decision to create war and the loss of humanity that follows.
The Greeks and contemporary writers can agree on one thing: tragedy is often manmade, and war is a historic, relevant example of self-destructive behavior. Du Maurier and the Greeks explore manmade tragedy in two specific ways. First, they establish autonomy, proving that tragedy is self-determined. Second, they use the tragedy to dehumanize their characters, reducing them to the warfare of the very tragedy they began. War is still a modern day, manmade tragedy. And now, we struggle with a new, additional manmade tragedy: climate disaster. The tragedy here is not the decision to create climate change, but the lack of decision in avoiding it. In Nileen Putatunda’s article “Floods: Avoidable Tragedy”, Putatunda writes of the floods that have caused havoc amongst Malda’s residents: “It is not as though devastation and catastrophe are indelible constants […] The misfortune that they have faced so far has been manmade”[15]. Thus, while decision and action are inherent in creating tragedy, so are indecision and inaction.
Bibliography
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Eumenides. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Aeschylus,, and Alan H. Sommerstein. Aeschylus: Persians: Seven against Thebes: Suppliants: Prometheus Bound. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Agard, Walter R. "Fate and Freedom in Greek Tragedy." The Classical Journal 29, no. 2 (1933): 117-26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3290417.
Bellanca, Mary Ellen. "The Monstrosity of Predation in Daphne Du Maurier's 'The Birds.'" Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18, no. 1 (2011): 26-46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44086927.
Du Maurier, Daphne. The Birds and Other Stories. New edition ed. London: Virago, 2004.
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Nileen Putatunda. "Floods: Avoidable Tragedy." Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 2 (2001): 101-03. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4410161.
Rosenmeyer, Thomas. "Seven against Thebes. the Tragedy of War." Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 1, no. 1 (1962): 48-78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162766.
[1] Walter R. Agard, "Fate and Freedom in Greek Tragedy," The Classical Journal 29, no. 2 (1933): 125, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3290417.
[2] Agard, "Fate and Freedom," 125.
[3] Agard, "Fate and Freedom," 123.
[4] Mary Ellen Bellanca, "The Monstrosity of Predation in Daphne Du Maurier's 'The Birds,'" Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18, no. 1 (2011): 30, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44086927.
[5] Daphne Du Maurier, The Birds and Other Stories, new edition ed. (London: Virago, 2004), 23.
[6] Du Maurier, The Birds, 24.
[7] Thomas Rosenmeyer, "Seven against Thebes. the Tragedy of War," Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 1, no. 1 (1962): 48, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20162766.
[8] Rosenmeyer, "Seven against," 57.
[9] Rosenmeyer, "Seven against," 58.
[10] Rosenmeyer, "Seven against," 57.
[11] Bellanca, "The Monstrosity," 27.
[12] ellanca, "The Monstrosity," 27.
[13] Du Maurier, The Birds, 21.
[14] Du Maurier, The Birds, 38.
[15] Nileen Putatunda, "Floods: Avoidable Tragedy," Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 2 (2001): 102, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4410161.